December 16, 2023
Let me tell you something that keeps me up at night.
AI can now write better than I can. Not just code—prose. Poetry. Ideas that sound almost like they came from a person who has lived a little, who has something to say.
And here's the uncomfortable part: I can't un-think this. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
There's been this expectation that AI will take over the "mundane" work. The repetitive stuff. The boring stuff. The stuff we secretly don't want to do anyway.
That's not what's happening.
AI is eating into the top of the food chain. The stuff we spent decades mastering. The things we thought made us special. Doctors. Lawyers. Engineers. Writers. Artists.
I know what you're thinking: "But AI isn't that good yet."
Fair point. But go ask ChatGPT to write something for you. Something that matters. Something you'd actually use. Then come back and tell me how good it isn't.
That should scare you. It scares me.
Here's a question nobody wants to ask: What happens when the things we spent our lives getting good at... aren't valuable anymore? We're living through the first generation of this. The internet made information free. AI just made thinking cheap.
Think about it. You spent years learning to write well. To reason through problems. To create something from nothing. Now a model trained on millions of human-written texts can do a passable imitation in seconds. Not better. Not yet. But "not yet" is a short runway.
The real question isn't whether AI can do your job. It's: what happens to you when it can?
We're told we'll all become "relationship managers" or "empathy specialists." That AI will handle the thinking, and we'll handle the feeling. Maybe. But I have my doubts.
Think about the last time something really mattered to you. A relationship. A loss. A choice you couldn't make with logic alone. AI can't do that. It can write about it. It can sound like it understands. But it's mimicking patterns. Not living them.
And here's where it gets interesting. Maybe that's exactly the point. When machines can think, what makes us human stops being our ability to think. It becomes something else entirely. Not productivity. Not output. Not how much value we can generate in a day. Something messier. Harder to measure. More alive.
Generative AI is a mirror. Not in the philosophical sense, though that works too. But in a more literal sense. It reflects us. Everything we've ever written. Every idea we've ever had. Every pattern of thought we've ever shared with the world.
What do you see when you look?
I see someone who spent a lot of time thinking being smart was the point. That accumulating knowledge and skills was the goal. That this is what made a life valuable. And I'm starting to think that was always a comforting story we told ourselves. A story that served a purpose in a world where thinking was scarce.
When machines can do what we do... maybe that's okay. Maybe it frees us to find something more. The being instead of just the doing. The messy, human stuff that doesn't fit on a resume or a performance review.
Maybe AI, in taking over the thinking, makes us more human.
I'll leave you with this thought from Neil Gaiman that I return to often:
"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before."
AI can mimic the words. It can't mimic the making. Not yet.
That's the space we're in now. The last moments of something.
What comes after?
That's up to us to figure out.