CODE IN TOKYO

Will "Nice People" Be the Ones Who Survive? — Revisiting Toshio Okada's "Evaluation Economy" in the Age of AI

Lately, while watching all the noise around AI and social media, someone suddenly came to mind: Toshio Okada.

If you’re a young Japanese person, you might know him as “that guy who gives life advice on YouTube.” But he originally founded the anime studio Gainax in the 1980s — the studio behind the smash hit Neon Genesis Evangelion — and was a central figure in Japan’s deep otaku culture.

Since then he’s worn many hats — executive, critic, university lecturer, YouTuber — and more than a decade ago he was already talking about something he called the “evaluation economy society.”

Honestly, at the time I thought, “Here’s another futurist think-piece.” But now that social media and AI have rewritten so many of society’s basic assumptions, his old argument feels strangely real.

”Evaluation” Now Comes Before “Ability”

Society used to be easy to understand. The structure was simple: you had ability, so you earned money.

You could write code. You could sell. You could draft blueprints. You could speak English. Those “direct skills” were converted into cash, just like that.

But the social-media era works a little differently.

First comes “this person seems nice.” Only after that do the jobs and projects start flowing your way.

The freelance world makes this especially clear. The “I’m the most skilled, period!” type tends to lose out to people who:

People like that keep getting work for far longer.

AI Is Starting to Break the “Scarcity of Ability”

And now AI has entered the picture.

It writes code. It writes prose. It translates. It summarizes. It builds slide decks.

Things that used to be “specialized skills” are being commoditized at remarkable speed.

Of course, the top-tier experts will remain. But the value of the middle layer — the “people who can do it well enough” — has become seriously shaky.

As a result, what’s left for the human side is, ironically, an extremely vague feeling: “I want to work with this person.”

How to put it… a skilled craftsman used to be strong. Now it’s the “nice person” who’s strong. Skill still matters, of course — but skill alone no longer gets you through.

The Scary Part of Okada’s Argument

The strangely unsettling part of Okada’s argument is this: “you don’t actually have to be a good person.”

In other words, he wasn’t making a moral argument. He was making a rather cold, rational one: “looking like a good person lowers your social cost.”

Watching social media, the people who survive aren’t the righteous or the capable. They’re the ones who:

This is less about good and evil and closer to risk management.

Companies are ultimately the same. Even someone with slightly lower ability — the “person who doesn’t cause trouble” — is the one who stays in the organization. Conversely, the brilliant-but-destructive type gets avoided.

The Coming Age of “Emotional Labor”

The more AI carves away parts of intellectual labor, the more what’s demanded of humans shifts toward “emotion.”

It sounds a bit like the service industry — but I have a feeling white-collar work as a whole is slowly heading that way.

Being a “temperamental craftsman” used to be forgiven. But now, “skilled but hard to deal with” is a pretty rough place to be.

And Finally, One More “Prophecy”

Recently Okada has been saying something even more interesting.

Going forward, he suggests, humans may no longer clash directly. Instead we may live in “a society where each side’s AI proxies talk to each other.”

For example, your personal AI would:

And the other party, too, would have their own dedicated AI.

In other words, instead of humans communicating directly, the AIs converse with each other over a “safe protocol.”

When you think about it, we already see hints of this. Drafting emails. Autocompleting chat replies. Summarizing meetings. Editing text so it won’t blow up online.

Everyone is, little by little, starting to offload “human emotional friction” onto AI.

Take it this far and it gets a little uncanny. What we kept being told AI would take from us was mainly “intellectual labor.” But maybe even “emotional labor” — the thing we assumed would survive to the very end — is something AI will quietly replace.

Reading the room. Being considerate. Adjusting yourself so you won’t be disliked. If AI absorbs even that “interpersonal stress,” what is left for humans to do?

Maybe future humanity will become a species of “everyone’s a king” — each of us protected by a butler AI, free to say only whatever we like.

…Though by then, it gets a little hard to say whether the ones actually doing the talking are still “humans.”