SuperSkills

A practical framework for human capability that survives AI.

What you will be able to do after reading

• identify where AI is quietly eroding judgement and capability

• redesign work around the human core, not around tools

• build a capability system that compounds under pressure

The 7 SuperSkills:

Curiosity, Change Readiness, Big Picture Thinking, Empathy, Global Adaptability, Principled Innovation, Augmented Mindset.

This book isn't about AI tools or productivity hacks. It's about staying human when machines rewrite the rules.

Description

Something important is happening to human judgement, and most of us are only dimly aware of it.

Every day, intelligent systems make thousands of small decisions on our behalf. What to read, whom to trust, which route to take, what to buy, how to respond. Each delegation feels minor. Cumulatively, they represent something else entirely: a quiet transfer of authorship over our own lives.

SuperSkills is a book about what happens when the texture of daily judgement (the small acts of noticing, weighing, and choosing) migrates to systems designed to optimise for outcomes we didn't consciously select. It's about the loss of agency that occurs not through dramatic displacement but through convenience. Through the slow atrophy of capacities we stopped exercising because something else handled them for us.

This is not an argument against AI or automation, nor a nostalgic appeal to do things the hard way. It's an examination of which human capabilities become more essential, not less, as intelligent systems advance, and why those capabilities require cultivation, not assumption.

Rahim Hirji identifies seven such capabilities: curiosity, stillness, big-picture thinking, empathy, global adaptability, principled innovation, and augmented mindset. These are not personality traits or soft skills. They are disciplines of attention. Practices that maintain human authorship over decisions that matter. They are what allow someone to remain awake inside systems designed to make wakefulness unnecessary.

The argument unfolds through stories that cost something to tell. A doctor sedates children in a flooded cave. A mother forgives her son's killer. A nurse overrides an algorithm and saves a life. A diplomat reframes a negotiation that had stalled for decades. The author's great-grandparents navigate by starlight. These are not illustrations of a framework. They are the evidence from which the framework emerges.

The book spans more than thirty countries without tokenism. Women lead nearly half the central stories, as decision-makers, not decoration. The author's own family history, from Gujarat to East Africa to London, is not backdrop but a through-line: proof that human capability is the only asset that compounds across generations.

SuperSkills includes a practical architecture: five questions, five weekly loops, and a one-page system teams can start immediately, not aspiration but structure. The framework is one page that will last for years.

The book shares concerns with Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto and Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: works that take seriously how humans maintain judgement inside complexity. Where Gawande focuses on error prevention and Meadows on system dynamics, this book asks a more personal question: who is still deciding?

The central tension (between the benefits of intelligent systems and the costs of unreflective dependence) is not resolved through rejection or embrace but through a third posture: deliberate engagement. Hirji calls this the difference between drift and design. Drift is what happens when we let systems shape us by default. Design is the ongoing work of remaining the author of one's own judgement.

For leaders, educators, parents, and professionals who sense that something important is being traded away in exchange for something convenient, SuperSkills offers both a diagnosis and a discipline. It does not promise mastery of the future. It offers something smaller and more urgent: a way to stay awake inside it.