I am a swim coach who specialises in one-to-one lessons. I am a good communicator, and I have a great deal of swimming experience. Could AI take my place?

I suppose the question then has to be; could someone else replace me? To that, everyone has to say, yes. Jobs I’ve left or moved on from didn’t implode or crumble, they carried on. But a replacement is not the same as a a clone.

To clone me, an AI robot would need to carbon-copy my history. Every experience I’ve had has shaped who I am. My experiences can not be stolen, and even my own memories are not perfectly remembered. Nobody can recall their life like a video. So it isn’t possible to clone me through my experiences. At best, AI could assemble a similar version of the things I’ve done. But would that be enough? Maybe.

The number of experiences I’ve had in swimming is immense. There is one constant: I’ve been involved with swimming since I was four years old. I’ve never stopped being in or around a pool for approximately 57 years. That’s over 20,000 days of swimming knowledge. Could AI replace that? Maybe.

Within those thousands of days I’ve met hundreds, maybe thousands, people involved with swimming. I’ve watched thousands of swimmers and thousands of races. If I learned something from each of those experiences, then that collective knowledge has become part of my own. World records, elite coaches in many fields of expertise, failed races, victorious races, odd circumstances, all of these combinations of memories contribute to who I am. Could AI replace that? Difficult.

Who I am also extends beyond swimming. I am a very good artist, and I like to communicate with swimmers through drawings. Could AI replace that? Yes.

The history of swimming is important because it explains how the sport has evolved, from the introduction of the dolphin kick to the development of wave breaststroke. I have a bachelor’s degree in History, so I naturally think in terms of historical perspective. Could AI replace that? Yes.

Understanding people and what motivates them is one of the most important coaching skills. You can’t simply bully someone into becoming a sporting champion. As part of my History degree, I also studied Psychology, giving me a solid grounding in how people think and learn. Could AI replace all of my psychological understanding? That’s more difficult.

What is left for AI to replace? Intuition.

Intuition is the ability to draw upon the entirety of my life’s experiences and instinctively decide what the next best step might be. I don’t always know what that step is until the moment arrives, but I trust that I will recognise it when it does. That intuition cannot simply be generated by AI. The whole of who I am is too complex to clone. I am far too complicated to reduce to a set of computer data points.

So yes, AI can help sort out my grammar, and perhaps even my disorganised life. But human beings remain valuable when they learn to trust their intuition. I believe that is the key to my longevity—and perhaps to ours as well.