I’ve been thinking a lot about this too, and I’ve started thinking of it in terms of quality vs quantity, and how that relates to industrialization, commercialization and productivity vs handcrafting, art and joy, and how all these things are tied together into the things we value and the things we don’t value.

AI, if it lives up to its promises (which I think it won’t in the long run, but for the sake of argument let’s assume it does), may produce many things in extraordinary quantity and sufficient quality to be commercially successful. This will likely become the standard way of acquiring most things we don’t care deeply about, just like cheap plastic crap replaced wood and metal toys. However not all cheap plastic crap is actually crap. Some of it is actually good. Also plenty of wood and metal crap was made too. Some of it was very valuable. A lot of it was not. The value was dictated by the rarity and the complexity, but the value also represented how much we appreciated it despite or because of its quality.

There will always be things we do care deeply about even when it doesn’t make sense to, and it frees us to make more conscious decisions about the the things we decide to care deeply about. It will not stop people from caring deeply about certain things, it will not stop enthusiasts from demanding better quality. The specific things people care about will almost inevitably change, becoming narrower in some cases and broader in others, or shifting directions entirely. Some things we used to have to care about the quality of, may no longer be so important to us. But with every closing door another one opens, we will find something new we very much do care about the quality of, and it may even be something better and more meaningful.

If you’re not following my pretty abstract ideas let me try and make it more specific. Timekeeping used to be an incredibly complex and labor intensive task, an institution like a church would have an entire staff with various tools used to keep track constantly, and then ring bells to let everyone else what time it is. That work eventually became a machine, but still requiring significant effort to construct and maintain. Towns would build one clock tower to serve the entire town population at once. Only very rich people could afford their own. Each one was, large or small, by modern standards a hand-crafted work of art. Gradually, that changed. They became more common, cheaper in cost, and cheaper in quality too, but they were still significant pieces in a household, designed to be looking nice and placed in prime locations. Then they got replaced by more portable pocketwatches, and then wristwatches, and then digital alarm clocks and digital sports watches, each one cheaper and junkier than the last iteration and eventually now we’re at the point most people just glance at the screen on their omnipresent smartphone that does a million different things all at once, few of those things being anything that anyone actually cares deeply about.

Lest you think this implies a depressing inevitability of decay and obsolesence that AI poses, yes I think there is potentially some of that ahead, and people often generalize that as “dying” and “loss”. But if you continue the clocks analogy, there are still people who value clocks, and even make clocks, in all their sizes and forms. As antiques or replicas, as works of art, as pieces of nostalgia, as history, as things of beauty and practicality, as things of style and culture. From the outside it’s easy to look at what’s left of the clock industry as something small and sad and dying, but from inside it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like joy and respect and appreciation and genuine enthusiasm. That is what we should be pursuing. The experts in their craft still have jobs, they might even enjoy their jobs more, crafting beautiful and skilled works of art to be sold to genuine enthusiasts that appreciate and value them instead of pumping out quantity and more quantity. There are lot of fewer of them, certainly, the experts and the enthusiasts and the clocks themselves, compared to the ones who used to be on every main street or high street and the market that used to include everyone and the clocks that used to be in every home and every pocket and every wrist. To capitalism, that means it’s “dying”, not worth investing in, belongs in the dustbin of history. To the people who choose to value it though, they don’t (and shouldn’t) give a toss what capitalism thinks. We value things as art because they are meaningful to us and they bring us joy.

A more modern and directly relevant example is video games. Gamers have, by and large, rejected all AI slop they can identify. This is partly framed as a moral choice yes, but it’s also a practical one. AI games aren’t likely to be as fun or valuable, and people are generally quite particular about the quality of the games they play, at least the ones without manipulative marketing, monetization and social aspects which is a whole separate can of worms. But no AI is ever going to create Baldur’s Gate 3 (or 1 or 2 for that matter). People enjoy it for its quality, for the thought and effort that went into it. Even if AI did create the same thing, simply knowing that it was AI or that AI was used would devalue it. Because the value of such things is not purely utilitarian. Morals and quality do apply very significant premiums to value, especially in certain areas like entertainment.

When it comes to things like entertainment, and really everything, the things we choose to enjoy, we actually appreciate them for the effort involved, not the end result. The end result is merely a symbol of the effort. We appreciate our child’s dance recital not because it rivals a broadway performance but because it is meaningful to us and we recognize our child’s effort. And we likewise appreciate a broadway performance because of our ability to acknowledge the effort the performers and stage managers and lighting technicians and everyone else took to get it to that level. AI doesn’t spark the same recognition of effort, because there is no effort. It is productive, but without effort it is not meaningful. It will not replace meaningful things, it will only replace things that are already pretty meaningless, that we are only still appreciating because we still recognize and appreciate the effort involved. When there is no more effort involved, we will not need to continue appreciating them, and many people will focus on appreciating more important things instead, and I want to believe that will include the education and the arts and the culture that actually matters to develop ourselves and our society and bring value our future, instead of the technology and tools that simply exist to make those things happen.

If you think high-quality software is something people won’t continue to value far into the future, AI or not, then I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. You might have to pivot a little. You might have to learn how to take advantage of some AI to help with more of the scaffolding and templating and refactoring than you are used to doing, or you might have to move to a more discerning product category like entertainment software where AI is explicitly rejected, but I am confident that your expertise will probably remain quite valuable somewhere as long as you can remain flexible enough to find a new niche that fits your goals.

Change is scary, but it’s not all bad. It’s just change. The change is almost certainly going to happen, but it will be as good or as bad as we decide to make it. We’re not doing a good job so far, but not all hope is lost. We all need to start to think about what we really value in life, and why, and the answer to what AI actually replaces will come from those collective decisions.