Love this, your best so far. This reminds us how every major era of human progress has been defined by a scarce resource that eventually became abundant. The printing press democratized knowledge. The Industrial Revolution democratized production. Radio and television democratized distribution. The internet democratized information. Today, as correctly articulate, AI is beginning to democratize intelligence itself. The fear many people feel, may not be about technology replacing jobs as much as it is about witnessing the graduation of problems that entire professions, institutions, and identities were built around. Just like what you share about the Longshoreman's Union leader.
What I found most compelling is the reminder that this pattern is not new. Human progress has always been a story of solving one set of problems only to inherit a new set. The question isn't whether change is coming, but whether we can separate our identity from the specific problems we solve today and adapt to the next ones. The observation that "every era that has existed has been someone's messy middle" is a powerful reminder that the AI era is not an exception to history, just the latest chapter in it. The question I keep coming back to is: if intelligence is becoming abundant, what becomes the next scarce and uniquely human source of value?
I think your chain of logic is right, but i want to postulate one additional step.
Humans will still be needed by humans because we are biological, social, meaning-seeking creatures. That does not require proof from labor history. It follows from what humans are. The forward guarantee rests on a simpler foundation than labor economics: we need each other because of what we are, not because the job market has always found room for us.
The issue is not whether humans remain needed. It is whether the unit doing the work remains the unaided individual human.
AI is already creating a new kind of working unit: the human-AI cognitive system. When applied correctly, the person and the machine reason together, search together, draft, test, and decide through continuous interaction. Over time that composite functions less like a person using a tool and more like a new kind of mind with two components. We may not be graduating from human work to machine work. We may be graduating from individual cognition to managed composite cognition.
In that world, the scarce inputs are not raw intelligence. They are judgment, reality testing, moral boundary-setting, and the ability to verify that the system's output remains connected to the world humans actually inhabit.
The danger is not that humans become unnecessary to one another. The danger is that humans remain socially necessary while becoming cognitively dependent, ceding authority to systems they no longer understand, constrain, or correct. The person still has a job. The person still matters to other people. But the reasoning driving their decisions has quietly migrated somewhere they cannot see or audit. The question your essay leaves open is how to graduate without losing that thread.
Love this : “What they’re actually afraid of is losing the problems their jobs were built to solve — and the identities they built around solving them.”
This is exactly why we need to stop shielding kids from any and all discomfort. Healthy challenges build confidence and adaptability, traits that are going to matter more and more. Because like you said, this isn't a singular event. It's always happened, it will keep happening, and it's only getting faster.
Interesting piece. Heightened uncertainty drives volatility and dispersion between perceived winners and losers in the market - creating great stock picking opportunities for those of us focused on monetizing AI
Good points on people's struggle to separate their identy from their professions/problems they solve throughout history! I'd like to add that our society has had a tendency to reinforce, almost mandate the merger of our jobs and identies. Kids are asked from a young age "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and the expected answer is a specific profession that solves a currently existing problem instead of generally applicable skills or broader interests. Perhaps the AI boom is a wake up call to cultivate a more agile mindset that can handle the changes technology is bringing?
But I also don't think that problem solving narrative tells the full story. I think you underestimate the extent to which people's fear around losing their job to AI simply revolves around the fear of losing their paycheck. A good chunk of people still live paycheck to paycheck and simply can't go without work. Even those who have decent jobs and are not in "survival mode" from day to day are dependent on working to be comfortable. Keynes was not broadly right, though I wish he was. Abundance of resources is only one aspect of his argument, and in my opinion not a central one. The key factor in his predictions is the changes in lifestyle, more specifically the ratio of labor to leisure time. His prediction was that the workweek would be reduced to 15 hours. We are very far from that reality. I suspect many people would still describe their lives as more grinding and consuming than true leisure.
I really appreciate this perspective and articulation. Thank you for continuing to keep it real without the drama.
Love this, your best so far. This reminds us how every major era of human progress has been defined by a scarce resource that eventually became abundant. The printing press democratized knowledge. The Industrial Revolution democratized production. Radio and television democratized distribution. The internet democratized information. Today, as correctly articulate, AI is beginning to democratize intelligence itself. The fear many people feel, may not be about technology replacing jobs as much as it is about witnessing the graduation of problems that entire professions, institutions, and identities were built around. Just like what you share about the Longshoreman's Union leader.
What I found most compelling is the reminder that this pattern is not new. Human progress has always been a story of solving one set of problems only to inherit a new set. The question isn't whether change is coming, but whether we can separate our identity from the specific problems we solve today and adapt to the next ones. The observation that "every era that has existed has been someone's messy middle" is a powerful reminder that the AI era is not an exception to history, just the latest chapter in it. The question I keep coming back to is: if intelligence is becoming abundant, what becomes the next scarce and uniquely human source of value?
I think your chain of logic is right, but i want to postulate one additional step.
Humans will still be needed by humans because we are biological, social, meaning-seeking creatures. That does not require proof from labor history. It follows from what humans are. The forward guarantee rests on a simpler foundation than labor economics: we need each other because of what we are, not because the job market has always found room for us.
The issue is not whether humans remain needed. It is whether the unit doing the work remains the unaided individual human.
AI is already creating a new kind of working unit: the human-AI cognitive system. When applied correctly, the person and the machine reason together, search together, draft, test, and decide through continuous interaction. Over time that composite functions less like a person using a tool and more like a new kind of mind with two components. We may not be graduating from human work to machine work. We may be graduating from individual cognition to managed composite cognition.
In that world, the scarce inputs are not raw intelligence. They are judgment, reality testing, moral boundary-setting, and the ability to verify that the system's output remains connected to the world humans actually inhabit.
The danger is not that humans become unnecessary to one another. The danger is that humans remain socially necessary while becoming cognitively dependent, ceding authority to systems they no longer understand, constrain, or correct. The person still has a job. The person still matters to other people. But the reasoning driving their decisions has quietly migrated somewhere they cannot see or audit. The question your essay leaves open is how to graduate without losing that thread.
I agree with both of your arguments here.
Humans are ultimately necessary to other humans as ultra-social creatures.
We need to build a world that is explicably good/moral/social.
I’m not sure how to do the latter yet. We’ll know soon, I expect.
On that note, I think the perfect dystopian film made today would be about a world that is inexplicably wonderful, and then the film would just end.
Agree with your views.
Love this : “What they’re actually afraid of is losing the problems their jobs were built to solve — and the identities they built around solving them.”
This is excellent. Good, fresh thinking. But, as you note, accurately assessing the problem doesn't make it easier for those impacted.
This is exactly why we need to stop shielding kids from any and all discomfort. Healthy challenges build confidence and adaptability, traits that are going to matter more and more. Because like you said, this isn't a singular event. It's always happened, it will keep happening, and it's only getting faster.
Interesting piece. Heightened uncertainty drives volatility and dispersion between perceived winners and losers in the market - creating great stock picking opportunities for those of us focused on monetizing AI
Good points on people's struggle to separate their identy from their professions/problems they solve throughout history! I'd like to add that our society has had a tendency to reinforce, almost mandate the merger of our jobs and identies. Kids are asked from a young age "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and the expected answer is a specific profession that solves a currently existing problem instead of generally applicable skills or broader interests. Perhaps the AI boom is a wake up call to cultivate a more agile mindset that can handle the changes technology is bringing?
But I also don't think that problem solving narrative tells the full story. I think you underestimate the extent to which people's fear around losing their job to AI simply revolves around the fear of losing their paycheck. A good chunk of people still live paycheck to paycheck and simply can't go without work. Even those who have decent jobs and are not in "survival mode" from day to day are dependent on working to be comfortable. Keynes was not broadly right, though I wish he was. Abundance of resources is only one aspect of his argument, and in my opinion not a central one. The key factor in his predictions is the changes in lifestyle, more specifically the ratio of labor to leisure time. His prediction was that the workweek would be reduced to 15 hours. We are very far from that reality. I suspect many people would still describe their lives as more grinding and consuming than true leisure.