The promise of AI is currently framed as relieving humans of the tedious tasks that encompass work, allowing them to focus on the more rewarding and creative problems of novel discovery and idea generation. This has been mostly true, but as AI gets better I think it has a high likelihood of becoming a comforting lie that we tell ourselves. The more capable AI becomes, the more humanity will have to resist being relegated to the middle management layer of its own progress. And the larger the risk that all human work becomes machine-like without any real sense of fulfillment or accomplishment. As AI gets better at the stuff that goes beyond execution and into the realm of judgement, creativity and purpose, the boundary between AI work and Human Work is going to destabilize. Without a conscious effort to push back against this, it’s easy to see a future where humans are relegated to supervising systems they no longer fully understand. “Drudgery” is defined by repitive, tedious tasks. But perhaps a better definition for it would be work with the absence of agency, and under that definition AI can certainly create more of it. Plenty of coders have already experienced a loss of meaning in their work as AI “solves” coding. “What is joy without despair” is accepted to be a fair question. But what is self-actualization without the overcoming of friction or frustration. I do worry a bit for the future generations that may live an entire life without experiencing the qualia of success after repeated full-effort attempts met with failure. If AI can execute our ideas, it’s likely that eventually it will be able to create better ones. Mastery and ownership of a creation being things of the past is hard to imagine. The most valid pushback to this concern is that people still play chess despite engines existing, make furniture from hand regardless of IKEA etc. I wonder if we’ll see an investment theme over the next decade that has to do with the “meaning economy”, or whatever people buy when their work is no longer their identity. Maybe in the more near term, there’s a trade in the value of accountability. If the vast majority of work isn’t done by a human, who do you yell at / fire when the work is bad? Anyone selling the right to blame a human or to outsource accountability (maybe E&O insurers?) could benefit.