Written down mostly so I stop turning it over in my head at night.
Lately I’ve been thinking about why AI makes so many people anxious.
The easy answer is work. I write code for a living, and I can already see AI doing a big part of what I do in a day. Not all of it, and not without someone to give it context and check its judgment. But when the problem is clear, maybe 80% of the actual work can be done with its help.
For a while there was a line we could draw, and it was a comforting one. Machines would take the repetitive work. The parts that needed real thinking or creativity would stay with us.
That line is getting hard to see. Math, coding, research, writing, drawing, design. These were the things we pointed to when we talked about intelligence. They took years to learn, and not many people got good at them. Now AI is getting good at a lot of them too.
I think that is why this moment feels so strange. It isn’t just that a tool can do part of my job. It’s that the part it can do was supposed to be the special part.
Maybe some of it is ego
We have always ranked skills. Some jobs count as smarter than others. Some abilities carry more prestige because they are hard to pick up. If you can solve hard math problems, write serious software, or make beautiful art, people take it as a sign of something deeper in you.
To be fair, the rarity was real. These things really do take years.
But somewhere along the way, I think we mixed up three things. How hard something is. How rare it is. How much it is worth. Because something was hard for us, we assumed it was hard in itself. Because only a few people could do it well, we assumed it was a higher kind of intelligence. I’m not sure arrogance is the right word. But it was something close to it.
So when AI walks right into the areas we were proudest of, the discomfort isn’t only about jobs. There is a small bruise to the ego too. Say I spent ten years getting good at something, and then the bar for doing it suddenly drops. Of course it feels like something was taken from me.
But what lost value wasn’t the thing itself. It was how rare it was. And those are not the same.
I still enjoy programming, even if code gets easy to write. Math is not less beautiful because a machine can solve the problem. We just got used to tying the meaning to the difficulty.
That is humbling. It is also, oddly, a relief. If intelligence isn’t a ladder, with some things sitting above others for good, then I can stop guarding my rung.
I can just be interested in things.
What if life is about how much I get to experience?
This is the thought that loosened the anxiety a little for me. What if I don’t have to measure my life by how fast I can run, or how hard I am to catch? What if life is, at least partly, about how much I get to experience?
It used to be expensive to walk into a new field. Not in money so much as in time and energy. You had to find the right books and learn the words. You had to work out which questions were silly and which were worth asking. You sat stuck for hours on things an expert could have cleared up in five minutes. Often the friction alone was enough to stop you.
That friction is disappearing fast. I can get curious about something in the morning and know enough by the afternoon to ask a decent question. I can read a paper outside my field without tripping on every term. I can wander into economics, biology, philosophy, or design just because something caught my eye.
None of that makes me an expert. It just makes looking around cheap. And I’m starting to think that matters more to me than getting more done.
I’ve started calling this the density of a life. We usually measure a life in years. But two lives of the same length can hold very different amounts of exploring, surprise, and change. Maybe technology can change that second dimension. Maybe I get to fit more lives into one.
If something that used to take me a month now takes a week, the obvious reading is that I can do four times as much. I’m not sure I want that. I don’t want a future where I answer four times as many emails and squeeze every hour of the day.
What I want is the other three weeks. Learn another subject. Try a new sport. Build something small. Walk into rooms I would never have walked into. Spend a while on a question that may go nowhere.
Sometimes these things run into each other. Something I picked up on the side changes how I think about my work. A small project turns into a research question. Most of these detours won’t lead anywhere big, and they don’t need to. Having had them is enough.
That is what I mean by a denser life. Not more output per hour. More kinds of experience in the same number of years.
Curious, anyway
None of this means the anxiety is wrong. I don’t know what AI will do to work. Some jobs will go away. Others will change dramatically. And it may be genuinely hard to build an identity around a craft while the economics of that craft change underneath you. I feel some of that too.
But lately, next to the anxiety, there is something else. Curiosity. If the walls between fields keep getting lower, I wonder how many things I’ll get to try that I would never have touched otherwise.
Maybe the people who find this hardest will be those of us who built too much of ourselves around a skill few others had. And maybe there is another way to stand. Not guarding what we already know because it is rare, but staying curious enough to keep walking into what we don’t.
I don’t know if this is the right way to think about the future. It’s just a thought I keep having. But if you like learning things just because they are interesting, there has probably never been a better time. It has never been this easy to ask a question and keep going.
Maybe intelligence getting cheaper doesn’t have to make a life feel smaller.
Maybe it leaves more room to live.