on ai, panic, and meaningful work
artificial intelligence arrived in a rush. models shipped overnight and the headlines promised displacement, but the emotion most builders actually felt was a quieter one: whether the work would still be there.
strip away the gold-rush noise and the pattern turns out to be older than the panic. keynes, writing in 1930, expected technological acceleration to absorb repetitive labour and hand the time back1. brynjolfsson and mcafee found much the same nearly a century later — automation takes over routine cognitive work and leaves judgment where it was2.
when software takes over the boilerplate, the repetitive syntax and the log parsing, what it removes is friction. aurelius made the point two thousand years earlier: most of what fills a day is not essential, and cutting it leaves you doing fewer things better3.
which leaves the harder question of what the time is for.