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 obvious answer is work. I’m a programmer, and I can already see that AI can do a surprisingly large part of what I do in a day. Not everything, and not without context or judgment. But inside a well-defined problem, it sometimes feels like 80% of the actual work can be done with its help.
For a while there was a comforting line we could draw: machines would take over the repetitive stuff, but not the things that need real intelligence or creativity.
That line has become hard to see. Math, coding, research, writing, drawing, design. These are exactly the things we used to associate with intelligence and years of training. They were hard to learn, and being good at them was rare. Now AI is getting good at many of them too.
And I wonder if that is why this moment feels so unsettling. It isn’t only 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 had a hierarchy of skills. Some jobs count as more intellectual than others. Some abilities carry more prestige because they are hard to acquire. If you can solve hard math problems, write sophisticated software, or make beautiful art, people read that as evidence of something deeper.
To be fair, the scarcity was real. These things really do take years.
But somewhere along the way, I think we started confusing difficulty, scarcity, and value. Because something was difficult for us, we assumed it must be intrinsically difficult. Because only a few people could do it well, we assumed it was some elevated form of intelligence. I’m not sure arrogance is the right word for that. But it was something close.
So when AI walks into exactly the territory we were proudest of, the discomfort isn’t only about losing jobs. There is also a small injury to the ego. If I spent ten years becoming good at something, and the barrier to doing it suddenly drops, of course it feels like something was taken from me.
But what became less valuable was not the activity itself. It was its scarcity. And those are different things.
I still enjoy programming even if code becomes easy to write. Math doesn’t become less beautiful because a machine can solve the problem. We were just used to attaching the meaning to the fact that these things were hard.
There is something humbling in that. I also find it strangely freeing. If intelligence isn’t a ladder, with some activities sitting permanently above others, then I don’t have to spend my life defending whichever rung I happened to climb.
I can just be interested in things.
What if life is about how much I get to experience?
That is the thought that loosened the anxiety a little for me. What if I don’t need 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?
Before, entering a completely new field was expensive. Not in money so much as in time and energy. You had to find the right books, learn the vocabulary, figure out which questions were stupid and which ones were actually interesting, and spend hours stuck on things an expert could have explained in five minutes. Often the friction alone was enough to stop you.
That friction is disappearing surprisingly quickly. I can get curious about something in the morning and know enough by the afternoon to ask interesting questions. I can read a paper outside my field without getting stuck on every term. I can wander into economics, biology, philosophy, or design simply because something made me curious.
None of that makes me an expert. It just makes exploring cheap. And I’m starting to think that matters more to me than producing more work.
I’ve been calling this the density of a life. We usually measure life in years. But two lives of the same length can hold very different amounts of exploration, surprise, and change. Maybe technology can change that second dimension. Maybe I get to fit more lives into one life.
If something that used to take me a month now takes a week, the obvious reading is that I can produce 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 optimize every hour of my 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 entered. Spend a while following a question that may lead nowhere.
Sometimes those things collide. Something I learn casually changes how I think about my work. A side project turns into a research question. Most of these detours won’t lead anywhere important, but they don’t need to. There is value in having had them at all.
That is what I mean by a denser life. Not more productivity in every hour, but more kinds of experience in the same lifetime.
Curious, anyway
None of this means the anxiety is wrong. I don’t know what AI will do to work. Some jobs will disappear. 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, alongside the anxiety, I’ve started feeling something else. Curiosity. If the barriers between fields keep getting lower, I wonder how many things I’ll get to try that I otherwise never would have touched.
Maybe the people who struggle most with this will be those of us who built too much of our identity around being able to do something other people couldn’t. And maybe there is a different way to orient: not around protecting the scarcity of what we already know, but around staying curious enough to keep moving into what we don’t.
I don’t know if that’s the right way to think about the future. It’s just a thought I’ve been having. But for someone who enjoys learning things simply because they’re interesting, there has probably never been a time when it was this easy to ask a question and keep going.
Maybe intelligence becoming cheaper doesn’t have to make life feel smaller.
Maybe it gives us more room to live.