The Robots Are Coming. Campfires Just Got More Important.

For decades, we told young people the same thing: learn the hard skills. Master calculus. Write code. Memorize facts. The soft skills, we said, were nice to have. Frosting on the cake.

The AI revolution has flipped the table.

Algorithms can now perform those hard skills faster, cheaper, and more accurately than any human. But an algorithm cannot read a room. It cannot navigate a complex political conflict. It cannot rally a team after a failure or build trust with a skeptical client.

The soft skills are no longer soft. They are the hard currency of the future economy. And no better place exists to develop that currency than summer camp.

Moravec's Paradox

In the 1980s, AI researchers discovered something counterintuitive. Making computers do hard things, like playing chess or solving calculus, is comparatively easy. Making them do simple things, like recognizing a face, reading tone of voice, or folding laundry, is incredibly difficult.

They called this Moravec's Paradox. High-level reasoning requires very little computation. Low-level sensorimotor skills and social intuition require enormous computation.

We are seeing this play out today. AI can write code, pass the bar exam, and analyze data faster than any human analyst. If your value proposition is "I know facts" or "I can follow rules," you are in trouble. You are competing with a machine that costs twenty dollars a month.

But the machine cannot paddle a canoe.

It cannot read the tension in a meeting and know exactly when to crack a joke. It cannot negotiate peace between two departments that distrust each other. It cannot mentor a junior employee through a crisis of confidence.

The economy is shifting. The hard skills are becoming commodities. The soft skills, the camp skills, are becoming the premium assets.

Julia's Epiphany

Julia was a sophomore in college during her second summer on staff. She was an Economics major, worried about her future.

Her friends were taking internships at banks and consulting firms. They were wearing suits. They were building their LinkedIn profiles.

Julia was wearing tie-dye. She was wiping tables. She was singing songs about moose.

She lay in her bunk at night wondering if she was making a mistake. Does this look cute on a resume, or does it look trivial?

Then came the thunderstorm.

Julia was leading a canoe trip with twelve eleven-year-olds when the sky turned a bruised green. The wind whipped the water into whitecaps. Thunder cracked like a cannon. One canoe tipped. Two boys were in the water, thrashing against the waves.

If Julia had panicked, the situation would have spiraled. If she had frozen, they would have drifted apart.

But Julia didn't freeze. Her training kicked in.

She paddled to the tipped canoe and spoke in a voice that was loud, calm, and devoid of fear. She got the boys out of the water. She organized the boats into a raft. Then, to keep everyone calm while they waited for the chase boat, she started a song.

She sang "The Princess Pat" at the top of her lungs while hail hit her face. She made the hand motions. She looked them in the eye and smiled.

Thirty minutes later, they were safe on shore. Wet and shivering, but calm.

That night, Julia realized something. Her friends at the bank were fetching coffee. They were making spreadsheets in the air conditioning.

She had just managed a life-or-death crisis with zero resources. She had regulated the emotions of a dozen people under extreme duress.

She wasn't a babysitter. She was a crisis manager. She was a leader.

The Amygdala Advantage

When we face stress, our brain processes the threat in the amygdala. This is the survival brain. It reacts in milliseconds: fight, flight, or freeze. If the amygdala takes over, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the part that handles logic, creativity, and planning.

A person can have an IQ of 160. But if they cannot regulate their amygdala, their effective IQ drops to zero during a crisis. They yell. They panic. They shut down.

Camp counselors are master regulators. They spend eight weeks living in a high-stress, high-noise, low-sleep environment. They manage their own amygdala while simultaneously managing the amygdalas of twelve children.

They are practicing the most valuable skill in the modern marketplace: self-regulation under pressure.

The New ROI

We used to ask: What is the return on investment of sending a child to camp?

We thought the return was fun. Memories. A break for parents.

Parents ask: Is it worth the money? Shouldn't my kid be doing SAT prep or a coding bootcamp?

They are asking the wrong question.

The return is a human being who can function in a disconnected world. The return is a leader who can regulate their own brain during a crisis. The return is an employee who can build a bridge when everyone else is building a wall.

If you want to be AI-proof, do not just learn to code. Learn to connect.

The robots are coming. They will take the jobs that require memorization, calculation, and rule-following.

They will never take the jobs that require a song in a thunderstorm.

About the Author

Matt Kaufman has spent 40 years in summer camp as a camper, counselor, and director, studying what makes people belong, grow, and thrive. He writes about intentional community, leadership, and the intersection of technology and human connection.

Connect with Matt:

• Instagram: @mattlovescamp

• LinkedIn: Matt Kaufman

• Website: ilove.camp

Books by Matt Kaufman:

• The Campfire Effect: How to Engineer Belonging in a Disconnected World (February 2026)

• The Summer Camp MBA: 50 Leadership Lessons from Camp to Career