The Smartest Guy I Know Called to Say It’s Over

The phone rang after the kids were down. I took it out to the back step, because the number was one I hadn’t seen in a while and I knew the call would be long. A friend. Someone I’ve looked up to for most of my adult life and have never once told.

The first thing out of his mouth was an assignment. “Dude, you need to submit some science fiction to a contest.” He had one picked out. He had the deadline. He’d already decided I was doing it, which is how he’s been about everything since the day I met him.

I should tell you about this guy. He builds things for a living, and as far as I can tell he has never had a boss. He reads more than anyone I know, and he writes, real writing, the kind with sentences in it. He is the person I call when I don’t understand something, and he always understands it. For years I’d hang up the phone and think, where does that come from? He seemed like he was from somewhere else.

So it took me a minute to catch what he said next, because it didn’t sound like him.

“We’re all fucked, man. It’s over.”

Intelligence doesn’t matter anymore, he said. Everything he’d built himself out of, the machine can do now, faster, for the price of a sandwich. He wasn’t being dramatic. I could hear him walking laps around his kitchen. He was tired, and he meant it.

The thing I said

I let him go for a while. Then I called bullshit. I’m not sure I’d ever done that with him, not once in twenty years of trying to keep up, and it didn’t sound like me either. But he was wrong, and the whole argument came down to one sentence, which I said out loud on the back step and have been turning over every day since.

The superpower was never the knowledge. It was him.

He didn’t buy it. Not that night. He said something like sure, sure, and kept walking his laps, and I knew the sentence had bounced off. The machine shows up and the first thing it takes isn’t your job. It’s your idea of what made you special.

I know, because a few years ago it took mine.

My version

I’d taken a job at a company that was failing. I didn’t know how badly. I thought I was going to save the day. There were good people in that building, truly good, some of whom I still think about. But the culture had gotten into them. Good people made acidic by the water they were swimming in.

My job became subtraction. Lay people off. Cut the budget. Do more with less, then do more with less than that. I still remember the first person I had to let go, and the sound the door made.

And then ChatGPT came out.

I remember the week. Suddenly there was this thing that could write, and think, or seem to, at a speed that made our whole content operation look like a horse-drawn cart. Everyone in every room was saying we needed to be using it, now, for everything. And standing in one of those rooms I felt exactly what my friend felt on the phone.

What am I good for? What is anyone good for? This thing can write the content. That’s the job. That’s what we do here.

I was about as low as I’ve been in my working life. I’d stopped writing anything that wasn’t for work. I’d stopped playing music. I’d stopped, mostly, being anybody in particular.

What fixed it

Here’s the part that matters, and it has nothing to do with technology.

I left. It took longer than I’d like to admit. And somewhere on the other side of leaving I did the thing I hadn’t done in years, which was go back and remember who I was. What I actually cared about. What I’d wanted to be before the job became subtraction.

For me that meant writing again. Not for a client. Not for a quarter. Bad, private, nothing-riding-on-it writing, at the kitchen table before the kids woke up. It was the first thing in a long time that felt like mine. It still is. You’re reading it.

That’s what I mean by the human in the loop, in the most basic way I can say it. Not a job title. Not a workflow. A person who knows who they are, standing next to a machine that doesn’t.

The real question

Because I’ve come to think the fear isn’t about AI at all. When someone tells me they’re scared of it, what I hear underneath is an older question.

Who am I now? All the things I thought made me special, what happened to them? Are they still worth anything? Am I?

The thing that made my friend my friend was never what he knew. It was the kid who had to find out, and who would go find out again tomorrow if you erased everything he knows tonight.

Which is what I was trying to tell him on the phone, badly, at eleven at night, with the sentence coming out sideways.

What finally landed, near the end, when he’d run out of steam, was smaller than all that. “That doesn’t sound like you, bro. You’re already a machine.” He laughed. It was the sound I’d been waiting for.

I’m going to enter the contest. He was right about that part. He usually is.

— Joe

P.S. Tell me the truth, one click: when AI scares you, what’s the actual question underneath? I’ll share the results next Sunday, and if you’d rather write it out, subscribers can hit reply on any Sunday essay. I read everything.

Last week’s poll: is talking to a bot in a coffee shop weird?

Six of you think I’m the weird guy at the corner table, five of you want to know which coffee shop, and one brave soul thinks it’s the future. I’ll take it. The office will be insufferable.

The vote came from Essay No. 6, Public Conversations with Bots.

From the Workbench

The essay above says the superpower is the person. This field guide says it from the other side: what the machine actually needs from you is your context and your taste, and neither of those ships in a model update. It’s the talk I gave a creative team over lunch, written down. Read the field guide: Context, Taste, and Building →

The Constellation

This week’s star from the chart: Munir Haddad, who built a company out of nothing but himself and a blackout, and who would have said to my friend what I said, only better. Read his profile: Something From Nothing →

Mostly Working

My comic strip about work, family, and the machines in between. This week, No. 24: a first client meeting, and the client’s position on AI is that she uses it for everything and it is going to kill us all. Same call as the essay, funnier hoodie. Matt has never smiled so much. Read No. 24 at Mostly Working →