I’m always confused by people who get unreservedly enthusiastic about AI-generated stuff. Asking AI to write or draw or code or whatever can be useful, but seeing it go to work gives me the same feeling I get when I google a cool thing that I wanted to make and see that somebody else has already made it. It’s very unintuitive to me why everyone doesn’t get that bored, dejected, empty feeling.

My current theory is that people who aren’t enthusiastic about AI are used to seeing value mostly come from stuff they do, while people who do get really enthusiastic about AI are more used to getting benefits from stuff they have. I get sad when I see AI do something that I wanted to do, because it’s taking something from me: the chance to work on something cool. Others are happy, because AI is giving them something: a new web app or blog post or song or whatever that is theirs alone.

I’ve spent a lot of time chasing the feeling of excitement and hyperfixation that I get from a new project. I owe my current career in large part to the fact that when I found out my college had an app development club that did tutorials, I started writing lessons on my own before even attending my first meeting there, and kept at it the rest of the time I was in college, writing and presenting some 30,000 words of material. Many other people apparently don’t get that feeling and aren’t that interested in it. I watch TV and read books and listen to music to connect with other people who feel very driven to make something cool. On the other hand, there are people who only listen to music that AI generated for them. They apparently either don’t recognize that feeling or aren’t seeking that connection.

I was baffled when a guy I worked with at my last job kept fantasizing about automating his job with AI. If Claude does all of your work, what’s the point of even being there? But AI gives people, even deep in the corporate world, a soupçon of the feeling of being a small business owner who’s delegated enough stuff that all they have to do is draw a salary, which, for a lot of people, is the dream. This kind of person seems to have a sense of ownership over their job and career such that they seem to think they’ll just keep having it even if Claude can do their job for them. They don’t feel threatened by AI, which I can only attribute to a feeling that they can stop having to do any actual work and keep getting paid. If you’re not actually your company’s owner, I’m not sure that’s always how that works?

My feeling that one’s job is temporary and contingent probably dovetails with my feeling that the stuff that you own is sort of temporary too: you’re going to die someday, and you can’t take it with you. What reverberates and adds value to the world is the work that you do that reaches others, even if it’s just hosting a meeting in an unused lecture hall where people can eat pizza and learn what React is; I don’t see the same value in creating one’s own personal collection of AI-generated music. Although of course those people at the meeting will eventually die too.

If you agreed with the above, probably don’t read this part

However, as a caveat, it’s also easy to oversell the value of hard work. I don’t think people really own their jobs, but we certainly don’t just create them through the sheer force of hard work and passion either. Most jobs, these days, are essentially artificially manufactured, and a lot of the time, they consist of being given semi-arbitrary tasks and doing them to satisfy people above you, so they can show results to the people above them, so they can show results to the people above them, at which point all detail and context has been lost and your specific actions probably don’t matter. Or, if you’re self-employed, or you’re one of the people at the top levels of corporate life deciding what other people’s jobs are going to be, you have to organize things around the needs and wants of customers, and must optimize for meeting and/or exceeding their specific expectations. This is very different from optimizing for getting the most work done, which tends to frustrate passionate and hard-working people. It’s all a nonsensical postmodern dreamscape, and all our notions of value are blown-glass fairy castles on the moon.