I work, I think?

I don't know exactly when I started noticing it. Somewhere in the past year, in meetings, at conferences, on feeds. A particular quality of confidence in people who have no business being confident. A smoothness. Outputs that look considered but aren't. Decks that have the right shape but none of the right thinking. And underneath it, something that took me a while to name: these people aren't embarrassed. They have no idea anything is missing.

That's the part that stays with me.

There's a version of the AI-and-work conversation that's about jobs. Will there be enough of them. Who gets displaced. Whether the gains get distributed or hoarded. That's a real conversation and other people are having it better than I can. This isn't that conversation.

This is about something that's already happening, that doesn't show up in employment figures: the quiet destruction of the feedback loop that turns inexperienced people into competent ones. The process by which you get something wrong, feel it, understand why, and become slightly less wrong next time. It's unglamorous and it's slow and it's the only way it's ever worked.

AI short-circuits that learning completely. Not maliciously. Just structurally. When you can generate something that looks right without doing the thinking, you will (most people, most people being me, will, most of the time, under pressure, with a deadline) and the muscle that thinking would have built never develops.

You don't notice the deficit because the outputs keep coming. Everything looks fine. Everything is fine, by every metric anyone is measuring. Until it isn't, and by then the people who would have known the difference have either left or stopped saying anything.

I work, I think?

My high school principal always said "Never choose a job based on what you want to be. Choose a job for what you want to do every day".

Marx wrote about this in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he describes what work actually does for a person, beyond just producing income. His argument is that the thing you spend your hours doing is the thing through which you come to understand yourself and your relationship to the world. The thinking, the trying, the making, the solving — that isn't separate from you. It is you.

Estrange a person from their work, make it something they merely perform rather than genuinely do, and you don't just take their time. You take something harder to name and harder to get back.

I used to think this was the romantic reading of labour. Now I think it's the precise one. Because what I'm watching, in slow motion, across an industry full of smart and well-intentioned people, is exactly that estrangement. Not forced on anyone. Chosen, incrementally, under entirely rational local pressures, by people who would probably object to the description.

The Luddites have been on my mind.

Skilled textile workers in early nineteenth century England who understood exactly what was happening to them and responded with coordinated, targeted action. They weren't against machines. They were against machines being used to hollow out skilled work, drive down wages, and concentrate the gains in the hands of mill owners who had no stake in what the workers lost. They saw the mechanism clearly. They named it. They fought it, briefly, before being crushed.

What they understood and what I think we're struggling to hold onto right now is that the question was never really about the technology. It was about power. Who controls the conditions of work. Who benefits from changes to those conditions. Who bears the cost.

We've been through this already, quietly, in the background, for decades. Property made inaccessible. Pensions made inadequate. The basic cost of a stable life ratcheted upward, steadily, by mechanisms abstract enough that it was hard to name a culprit.

Efficiency! was the word used. Optimisation!

The people making those decisions live somewhere that consequences don't reach.

Now it's the work itself. The thinking. The last thing that can actually actually be mine.

Looming dread

The mill owners didn't build the looms. My peers. Designers. Engineers. Product managers. Founders. We're constructing, with genuine intelligence and often genuine good intentions, the systems that are doing this to us, and everyone else.

The incentives are there, the pressure is real, the alternative is being left behind, and nobody wants to get caught with their pants down while everyone else moves. The logic of inevitability is coherent at the individual level. At the collective level it's a mechanism for producing outcomes nobody really wanted, with no obvious brake.

"We can't just un-invent it!" they tell me.

I watch people I respect evangelise tools that will commoditise their own expertise. I watch founders sell products they know, at some level, will make the case that even founders aren't necessary. I watch the whole devaluation apparatus accelerate and I understand why each individual component is accelerating.

Speeding around this bend towards the event horizon, I can't see where it stops. Can you?

The heat death of doing things.

I don't have a programme. But I have a strong preference for staying on the side of this where the thinking is still real and present. Not because it's a moral victory, or a winning career move (probably not), but because the alternative isn't neutral.

You don't stay still if you stop doing the work. You drift. And the drift is invisible from the inside. You don't feel yourself becoming someone who can't tell the difference anymore. You just gradually stop noticing that you used to be able to. The thing you've been separated from doesn't haunt you. It just stops being imaginable.

Some of us can feel the temperature dropping. Some of us are turning up the cooling ourselves. Most of us, if we're being straight about it, are doing some of both.

I'm not happy or willing to let that happen to me. I'm also not sure that I can stop it. But at the scale of my practice, my person, my work? That much I can try to hold onto. And I'm already failing. I have to use AI every day now, not because I want to, but because I need to earn income. The honest thing is to admit it rather than pretend I'm outside the problem I'm describing.

But bit by bit, I feel my beloved work become something I perform and not do.