AI might be the best thing for humanity since we forgot how to be human.
I’ve spent the last decade bouncing between elite institutions and the ditch on the side of the road. I’ve been the prodigy, the dropout, the banker, the founder, the car washer, the guy people whispered about at reunions. I became the person I was told I should be, realized I hated it, and only then started becoming the person I was meant to be.
Today, I’m the Co-founder and General Partner of Daring Ventures—a pre-seed fund backing software that augments human potential by investing in sectors where trust, nuance, and relationships still drive the outcome.
Everyone’s afraid AI is going to replace us. What if it’s about to save us instead?
Not by benevolence or design, but by burning down the lie we’ve been living under: that intelligence is something you can standardize?
AI is exposing how much we deify machine-like performance. Things measured in credentials and scores. Things like fluency in systems that reward optimization over originality.
Let me get this out of the way. I don’t think AI is going to kill us. But I do think it’s going to kill something else: the story we’ve told ourselves about what it means to be smart.
I’ve spent most of my life in the territory I now call "out of scope," the place where conventional playbooks fall apart.
I grew up in a family where education was everything. On my mom’s side, Yale wasn’t just a school. It was a bloodline. My mom, uncle, grandfather, great-uncle all went. It was legacy, both literally and figuratively.
On my dad’s side, education was a miracle. He grew up in a remote village where some homesteads (including the one he grew up in) didn’t get electricity until the 21st century. At one point, he wore trash bags on his feet and trudged miles to school in the snow and worked his way to a PhD.
But both stories, as different as they were, were built around the same idea. The point of the struggle was to prove you could join the club. The credential as the validation of the journey.
I was on the proverbial path to join the credentialed elite. Early reader. Gifted programs. Obnoxiously articulate. Obsessed with mythology and castles. Competitive in Continental Math League. Everyone said I was going to be something big.
Then high school happened. Sure I had been a quick learner, but everyone else had caught up.
My identity as a “smart kid” started to crack.
It was the peak of the “No Child Left Behind” era. My classmates were the children of chemical engineers, pharma execs, and finance people and STEM was king. Everything revolved around quantifying academic performance and the message was clear: excellence boiled down to a number.
I leaned into my English and history classes where I excelled. Math & science? Not so much.
The net result: My standardized tests told a jagged story. My GPA had too many footnotes. I didn't fit.
I didn’t stand out in a way the system was trained to recognize.
According to the narrow parameters of our quantified meritocracy, I was out of scope. I didn’t get into any of the colleges I applied to and what remained of my self-esteem was toast.
As all my friends left for the Ivy League, the SEC, or the Big Ten, I was off to community college.
I was ashamed. I felt like an outcast. I hated it. Not because of the place itself, but because of what I had been told it meant.
My whole life, I’d been taught, subtly by culture and told by people who thought they were helping, that community college was for people who had failed. For the ones who didn’t live up to their potential. That thing I once believed I had so much of.
Community college felt like the final confirmation that something had gone wrong. I didn’t want to be seen.
“Why should I go?”
“Why should I care?”
“This is worthless right?”
Naturally, I flunked out.
And I heard what people said behind my back. I heard what they said to my face.
“What happened?”
That question haunted me. What happened?
What happened is this: I bought into a system that measures intelligence through test scores, filters it through credentials, and rewards people who play the game.
And when I fell out of the game, it stopped pretending I mattered, but I still deeply cared.
So I went back. Flunked out again. And again. Hitting that bottom, washing cars at Enterprise while my friends landed big consulting and banking gigs in NYC, Boston, and SF, felt like the end of the line.
But something unexpected happened back at community college. I found a community. Turns out, there were way more people like me. People who didn’t fit a standard trajectory. People who were brilliant in ways that fell outside the narrow lines of standardized tests and GPAs.
And I made life-long friends at Santa Monica College who showed me what it meant to care about something beyond ambition. They helped me get out of my own head. They reminded me that curiosity, kindness, and humility weren’t liabilities. They were strengths.
That’s when I started to see it clearly. The system doesn’t reward intelligence. It rewards system fluency. It rewards people who are good at being good at things.
So I went back.
I wish I could say I went back on a mission to beat the system at its own game. Truthfully, I was still chasing a feeling of belonging.
I thought if I could just climb high enough, earn the right credentials, land the right job, maybe I could re-enter the story I was supposed to be in.
But the higher I climbed, the more hollow it felt. The relentless focus was entirely on the signals, not the substance. I started to see the system for what it was: The metrics, the gatekeeping, the myth of meritocracy dressed up as rigor.
So I made a decision.
I would still play the game, but not to belong.
To infiltrate.
I put on the armor, studied the rules, and played them better than anyone. From community college dropout to Ivy League banker in three years. Not to join the club, but to understand its blueprint and eventually, dismantle it.
I realized how many of us are “out of scope.” Living outside the neat parameters where conventional advice works. Going back to college as a 3x dropout is out of scope. Breaking into banking with that background is out of scope. Starting a program to help community college kids get to Wall Street is out of scope. Launching a venture firm without the standard pedigree is out of scope.
The professional sheep know how to study for the test, follow the playbook, go from elite high school to elite college to a bulge bracket bank. But the rules fail everyone else. Those of us who are out of scope rely on something else. Grit. Resilience. Soft skills. We can't just be human computers.
I wore the suit. Learned the language. But I never forgot what I saw on the outside.
I saw how many brilliant people were stuck. How many founders with real insight were dismissed because they didn’t talk like TechCrunch. I saw the lie baked into the pitch decks, the data rooms, the consensus.
I learned to navigate the maze they built. The same mindset that designed that human maze is now building something colder—faster, cleaner, and easier to worship. A machine version of the same values, but without the mess of being human. No context. No contradiction. Just performance. Because that’s all human intelligence is, right?
And here's the kicker. The very people building AI aren't just products of this credential-obsessed framework—they are the framework, now automated and scaled. They’re not trapped in the system; they’re actively perpetuating it, codifying its narrow definition of intelligence into algorithms, and making a fortune selling it back to us as progress.
You hear it in how they talk about their models, like they’re assembling the world’s most overqualified think tank:
“This model performs at a master’s level in biology.” “It’s like having a thousand PhDs working on your problem.” As if the pinnacle of human achievement is just credentialism at scale, digitally cloned.
But here’s the beautiful irony: In their race to build the ultimate thinking machine based on their rules, they are creating the very tool that will expose the limitations of that game. By perfecting the machine that can ace the test, score the highest, and replicate the patterns of the credentialed elite, they are inadvertently shining a massive spotlight on everything else. They are building the ultimate proof that machine-like performance isn't the peak of value; it's the baseline that can be automated.
This AI-ification of everything we thought made people 'smart' according to the old rules is about to dramatically underscore the value of good old-fashioned organic humanity – the stuff that can't be quantified, scaled, or downloaded. They are, in effect, coming for themselves. The very system they champion is being made obsolete by their own creation.
That's why the narrative of AI replacing us misses the deeper point.
AI isn't the primary threat to our humanity; it's the catalyst that might just save us from a world that has increasingly forgotten what being human is truly worth. It forces the great inversion we need.
This isn't a new obsession, of course. It has deeper roots. While the fixation on data is a newer development in some spaces, the borderline obscene obsession with intelligence is nothing new in Palo Alto.
Stanford helped build the scaffolding. IQ tests. The SAT. Psychological sorting systems with roots tangled in eugenics and class control. Not everyone remembers that part. But the logic is still here, humming beneath the surface.
Only now it’s sterilized as impartial, data-driven, and academically rigorous.
They still believe intelligence is something you can extract, rank, and scale. That brilliance is the output you get when you input enough credentials. That a thousand compressed Ivy League brains in a box is the future of progress.
And now they’ve built a machine that’s better at their game than any human alive.
Good.
Let the machines have the performance game. Let them eat the rote tasks and the quantifiable work. Let them write the cold emails and rank the resumes and analyze the A/B test.
Because that clears the way for what humans do best.
Humans are built for what machines can't touch. Nuance. Paradox. Taste. Instinct. Knowing when someone’s full of shit. Asking a better question. Solving a problem no one knew how to name. Being real. Working as a team. Building trust. Telling stories. Seeing the person in the room who’s being ignored and pulling them in.
These are the skills you develop when you’re out of scope. When you can’t follow the map because there isn’t one.
We’re not here to be efficient. We’re here to be effective.
That’s the great inversion AI is about to force. All the stuff that looked “soft” is about to become the sharpest edge you can have.
And all the people who thought their SAT score made them superior are about to meet a machine that scores even higher.
I’m not afraid of AI. I’m rooting for it.
Because it’s going to shake loose the myth of meritocracy.
It’s going to rip the mask off a culture that thinks intelligence can be ranked, sorted, and credentialed into existence.
And it’s going to make space for the rest of us.
The ones who don’t fit the pattern. The ones who failed out and came back. The ones who built our intelligence through pain, curiosity, and persistence.
The out of scope ones.
The human ones.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you: joseph[at]daringventures[dot]vc