This captures something I’ve been trying to name in my own work: the difference between optimizing for output and designing for meaning. The way you trace the arc from craft to compliance to performance is felt. Especially now, when so many of us are navigating systems that move faster than care.
What you’re offering is a reminder that judgment, presence, and care aren’t luxuries. They’re the baseline for anything worth building next.
Thank you. I'm trying to teach systems to reflect this level of humanity.
Your description of the connection from the technology industrial revolution to AI is beautiful. It illuminated something I'd felt but not articulated.
I've got an alternative theory about Craft...
It's not that Craft is dying, instead we're losing Art. If you look at a streetlamp from 100 years ago, the beauty was in its Art. Why did they invest that time and effort making a functional object so gorgeous? Because...?
Craft is focused on "HOW?" - the function of the output. This is the realm of automation as progressively AI takes on more and more of the "how-ing".
Art is focused on "WHY?" and "WHAT?" The purpose of the output and what could deliver this purpose. At this point, an AI has no reason to do anything, so it can't decide what to make, what is good without a human.
But any human can use AI to augment and expand what's possible - and automate what stops them creating the previously impossible.
This is what men have done and will continue to do. You suggest that we need to shift what we value- yes absolutely, but then go on to say that we need to measure something different. No! We do not need to measure anything. Measuring produces a false meritocracy and gives rise to inequity, hierarchy and the world we see around us. Some are not better than others; the only thing we need to do is fully see each others humanity and tether ourselves back to the earth that gives us life. Thiel wants transhumanism and human rights for AI.
I hear you and I agree that the obsession with measurement has often distorted our sense of worth, reducing people to outputs, rankings etc … but not every measurement is harmful. The real question is: what are we measuring, and why? When used with care and context, metrics can guide behavior in a meaningful way with feedback, insight, even accountability … think of when a doctor asks you to rate your pain from 0 to 10, it’s a form of measurement. But it’s not designed to rank you, it’s designed to understand you. It gives voice to a subjective, invisible experience and helps tailor care. That’s the kind of shift I’m pointing to.
An optimist can see great opportunity in all this. Seriously! Just as those IBM punchcard workers were happy to escape the mills of their forefathers, so too are we happy escape to higher ground. But the ultimate higher ground is Craft. Escaping the machine to engage with the real world again. Your examples are spot on.
Cameras didn’t kill art. But with cameras, art changed into something less mechanistic, stranger and yet (sometimes) better and more insightful than the rote portraiture of pre-camera art. It seems possible we’ll all be artists in the future. Or naturalists, engrossed and engaged with the truly real world. And relentlessly out in it.
“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” -Wallace Stevens
I really like this - currently, I think AI is still so new and makes enough mistakes that skilled users know that it cannot be left on its own and needs a thoughtful user to achieve maximum value. For those teachers that attempt to bridge that gap, it's a critical reminder. Fortunately, all it takes is interacting with curious, thoughtful, and energetic teens to recognize that our value is how we show up every day. Many will use AI but most would prefer to learn from us.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Hopefully in the spirit of dialog you display here, let me try to push your further, as I was trying before:
Raising children, running a household, hanging out and doing things with friends, hanging out and doing things alone--all the activities outside of "work" are also being transformed by AI and other new technologies. (This is what I'm fixated on at Mind Revolution.)
What we do at "work" seems to be taking up less and less of humanity's time, and most of us are very grateful for that. It is all this other nonwork time that I think you should try to include in your recommendations for the future. I am not sure that "care, presence, and judgment" are what people would think are the core values to preserve in our nonwork time (or in our work time, either, for that matter.)
I say all this as someone who worked as a farmer for 20 years, macadamia nuts. I also worked at raising 2 children as a single father (all before I became a knowledge worker professor for 20 more years). Childcare and household management seem to have no place in your model--excluding so many people.) "Work" was not ever that important to me, compared to my non-work hours.
And I think what you are aiming for is a vision to carry us Beyond Work, to a time when we do not have to sell our time at all, or not very much.
Of course I appreciate a different perspective, it shows you care, and that care is deeply human.
I read your response as a call to ask what happens when superintelligence touches every corner of life, not just work. It’s a key question, but here’s where I’m anchoring for now:
You can’t transcend what you haven’t repaired. There’s no real abundance or post-work bliss while the architecture of value is broken. Uploading a mind into a glitching system only scales the dysfunction.
Until we fix how society rewards (or punishes) our time, energy, and attention, any leap into a post-labor future will rest on sand. We can engineer exponential wealth, leisure time and still feel empty. Everyone has their own stories and experiences that shape their system of thinking. Mine is that … “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Yes, and of course we each must work on the part of the problem that most interests us and for which we have skills. It encourages me that you are doing such deep work in a domain you know so much about!
I really appreciate you taking the time to pause here, reflect on this piece, and share such a thoughtful perspective. If anything, the world needs more of that
What about being human do we value that we should make sure we preserve through the revolution in consciousness now begun? I think this is a crucial question and one you, too, are pursing in your posts. Thanks for your careful thought about these matters.
I worry, though, that you are not thinking broadly enough. The majority of humans on Earth n any year did not labor in factories or in office buildings, but on farms and in trades, small businesses, where work was not often/usually about quality so much as just getting it done, to have food, to earn some money. I don't think this article speaks to their experience in the past, or likely what it could be in the future.
I agree we need to rethink work going forward, but I don't think that "work" for most people, even now, is what they/we value most about being alive. It's just what we have to do to get by. People don't often have "callings".
Readers of Substack are (mostly) knowledge workers and so the history of work you tell may seem universal to them. But we knowledge and factory workers are today a minority of the workforce across the world, even in the most advanced industrial societies. I think you may need to expand your conception of what makes work valuable, and rethink how much of what people value about life for most people is closely tied to their work.
Thanks so much for reading and for challenging some points. You’re absolutely right for most people, work has always been about survival, not calling. And we can’t rethink the future of work without honoring that reality.
But when I use the word craft, I’m not talking about elite jobs. I’m pointing to something human: the care, presence, and judgment people bring to what they do whether it’s farming, nursing, fixing pipes, etc. That used to matter.in the past we were more connected to the work we produced (that’s the point I wanted to emphasize). But over time, the system started prioritizing speed, scale, and optimization. Those who could optimize were elevated. They got the higher salaries, big offices. Those who worked with their hands, their bodies, their hearts were overlooked. Underpaid. Burned out. And that’s the real tragedy: for one group , it gave them the illusion of success and status … for the other neglect.
Not just that care went unrewarded, but that the capacity for care itself was systemically discouraged. So I’m asking is …what if we built systems that made space for care and actually rewarded it?
Not just in “knowledge work” type of jobs, but across all kinds of work.
Because it’s not output alone that makes us human. Answering your initial question, what makes us human is how we show up …with integrity, presence, and care.
This newsletter is inspiring, it's encouraging to see more people putting humans at the center, especially at a time when that's far from trivial. Your idea of the 'human metric' resonates with why I started writing my own newsletter, 'AI For Humanity.'
Like you, I've been exploring how to intentionally shape our relationship with AI so that human dignity, judgment, and genuine care remain at the heart of our work. It's exciting to see these reflections becoming more central in broader conversations.
This was wonderful. I might suggest a fourth, fundamentally human capacity along with the three you mentioned: vulnerability. Or put more concretely, "sensitivity to consequences." This speaks to yet another dimension of care, relating to embodiment. We not only care about excellence and meaning, but that we have existential and/or personal stakes in what happens to us and those we care about.
This is a long piece expressing something important but like the system it critiques lacks connection. With you sitting next to me, touching my hand as we work and considering together this huge dilemmas , what does it mean? And is there a deeper recognition of this already worked out in the history of the human love of knowledge—philo-sophy? Isn’t there? Where is the collective and the collective energy behind your words? Wouldn’t I already be there? That is if it is true? I want to invite you to live into this together, where it is already alive and we are already aware, even if only prematurely, still, so we can move together into the emergence within the emergentcy. :)
Data IS You - the book has answered many of your posed questions;
- privatization personal data (data dividend)
- first-person datasets (store-of-value)
- Persons Asset Class (transactional)
- Intellectual Teleology (scientific category)
An excerpt from the chapter, "Final Thoughts": "To live authentically in the digital age is to recognize that our data is not just a reflection but an extension of our being—a responsibility as profound as our own existence."
This captures something I’ve been trying to name in my own work: the difference between optimizing for output and designing for meaning. The way you trace the arc from craft to compliance to performance is felt. Especially now, when so many of us are navigating systems that move faster than care.
What you’re offering is a reminder that judgment, presence, and care aren’t luxuries. They’re the baseline for anything worth building next.
Thank you. I'm trying to teach systems to reflect this level of humanity.
“systems that move faster than care…baseline for anything worth building next” 🔥🔥🔥 I love this all so much.
Your description of the connection from the technology industrial revolution to AI is beautiful. It illuminated something I'd felt but not articulated.
I've got an alternative theory about Craft...
It's not that Craft is dying, instead we're losing Art. If you look at a streetlamp from 100 years ago, the beauty was in its Art. Why did they invest that time and effort making a functional object so gorgeous? Because...?
Craft is focused on "HOW?" - the function of the output. This is the realm of automation as progressively AI takes on more and more of the "how-ing".
Art is focused on "WHY?" and "WHAT?" The purpose of the output and what could deliver this purpose. At this point, an AI has no reason to do anything, so it can't decide what to make, what is good without a human.
But any human can use AI to augment and expand what's possible - and automate what stops them creating the previously impossible.
The clarity here is refreshing. I’ve seen too many people complicate this—your distillation cuts through. Really great analysis.
This is what men have done and will continue to do. You suggest that we need to shift what we value- yes absolutely, but then go on to say that we need to measure something different. No! We do not need to measure anything. Measuring produces a false meritocracy and gives rise to inequity, hierarchy and the world we see around us. Some are not better than others; the only thing we need to do is fully see each others humanity and tether ourselves back to the earth that gives us life. Thiel wants transhumanism and human rights for AI.
I hear you and I agree that the obsession with measurement has often distorted our sense of worth, reducing people to outputs, rankings etc … but not every measurement is harmful. The real question is: what are we measuring, and why? When used with care and context, metrics can guide behavior in a meaningful way with feedback, insight, even accountability … think of when a doctor asks you to rate your pain from 0 to 10, it’s a form of measurement. But it’s not designed to rank you, it’s designed to understand you. It gives voice to a subjective, invisible experience and helps tailor care. That’s the kind of shift I’m pointing to.
An optimist can see great opportunity in all this. Seriously! Just as those IBM punchcard workers were happy to escape the mills of their forefathers, so too are we happy escape to higher ground. But the ultimate higher ground is Craft. Escaping the machine to engage with the real world again. Your examples are spot on.
Cameras didn’t kill art. But with cameras, art changed into something less mechanistic, stranger and yet (sometimes) better and more insightful than the rote portraiture of pre-camera art. It seems possible we’ll all be artists in the future. Or naturalists, engrossed and engaged with the truly real world. And relentlessly out in it.
“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” -Wallace Stevens
Absolutely love this and the call to value what has always made humans valuable even when we were busy being attached to machine metrics 💕💕
I really like this - currently, I think AI is still so new and makes enough mistakes that skilled users know that it cannot be left on its own and needs a thoughtful user to achieve maximum value. For those teachers that attempt to bridge that gap, it's a critical reminder. Fortunately, all it takes is interacting with curious, thoughtful, and energetic teens to recognize that our value is how we show up every day. Many will use AI but most would prefer to learn from us.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Hopefully in the spirit of dialog you display here, let me try to push your further, as I was trying before:
Raising children, running a household, hanging out and doing things with friends, hanging out and doing things alone--all the activities outside of "work" are also being transformed by AI and other new technologies. (This is what I'm fixated on at Mind Revolution.)
What we do at "work" seems to be taking up less and less of humanity's time, and most of us are very grateful for that. It is all this other nonwork time that I think you should try to include in your recommendations for the future. I am not sure that "care, presence, and judgment" are what people would think are the core values to preserve in our nonwork time (or in our work time, either, for that matter.)
I say all this as someone who worked as a farmer for 20 years, macadamia nuts. I also worked at raising 2 children as a single father (all before I became a knowledge worker professor for 20 more years). Childcare and household management seem to have no place in your model--excluding so many people.) "Work" was not ever that important to me, compared to my non-work hours.
And I think what you are aiming for is a vision to carry us Beyond Work, to a time when we do not have to sell our time at all, or not very much.
Main thing: I appreciate your work here :)
Of course I appreciate a different perspective, it shows you care, and that care is deeply human.
I read your response as a call to ask what happens when superintelligence touches every corner of life, not just work. It’s a key question, but here’s where I’m anchoring for now:
You can’t transcend what you haven’t repaired. There’s no real abundance or post-work bliss while the architecture of value is broken. Uploading a mind into a glitching system only scales the dysfunction.
Until we fix how society rewards (or punishes) our time, energy, and attention, any leap into a post-labor future will rest on sand. We can engineer exponential wealth, leisure time and still feel empty. Everyone has their own stories and experiences that shape their system of thinking. Mine is that … “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Yes, and of course we each must work on the part of the problem that most interests us and for which we have skills. It encourages me that you are doing such deep work in a domain you know so much about!
I really appreciate you taking the time to pause here, reflect on this piece, and share such a thoughtful perspective. If anything, the world needs more of that
What about being human do we value that we should make sure we preserve through the revolution in consciousness now begun? I think this is a crucial question and one you, too, are pursing in your posts. Thanks for your careful thought about these matters.
I worry, though, that you are not thinking broadly enough. The majority of humans on Earth n any year did not labor in factories or in office buildings, but on farms and in trades, small businesses, where work was not often/usually about quality so much as just getting it done, to have food, to earn some money. I don't think this article speaks to their experience in the past, or likely what it could be in the future.
I agree we need to rethink work going forward, but I don't think that "work" for most people, even now, is what they/we value most about being alive. It's just what we have to do to get by. People don't often have "callings".
Readers of Substack are (mostly) knowledge workers and so the history of work you tell may seem universal to them. But we knowledge and factory workers are today a minority of the workforce across the world, even in the most advanced industrial societies. I think you may need to expand your conception of what makes work valuable, and rethink how much of what people value about life for most people is closely tied to their work.
Thanks so much for reading and for challenging some points. You’re absolutely right for most people, work has always been about survival, not calling. And we can’t rethink the future of work without honoring that reality.
But when I use the word craft, I’m not talking about elite jobs. I’m pointing to something human: the care, presence, and judgment people bring to what they do whether it’s farming, nursing, fixing pipes, etc. That used to matter.in the past we were more connected to the work we produced (that’s the point I wanted to emphasize). But over time, the system started prioritizing speed, scale, and optimization. Those who could optimize were elevated. They got the higher salaries, big offices. Those who worked with their hands, their bodies, their hearts were overlooked. Underpaid. Burned out. And that’s the real tragedy: for one group , it gave them the illusion of success and status … for the other neglect.
Not just that care went unrewarded, but that the capacity for care itself was systemically discouraged. So I’m asking is …what if we built systems that made space for care and actually rewarded it?
Not just in “knowledge work” type of jobs, but across all kinds of work.
Because it’s not output alone that makes us human. Answering your initial question, what makes us human is how we show up …with integrity, presence, and care.
Great arricle!!
This newsletter is inspiring, it's encouraging to see more people putting humans at the center, especially at a time when that's far from trivial. Your idea of the 'human metric' resonates with why I started writing my own newsletter, 'AI For Humanity.'
Like you, I've been exploring how to intentionally shape our relationship with AI so that human dignity, judgment, and genuine care remain at the heart of our work. It's exciting to see these reflections becoming more central in broader conversations.
This was wonderful. I might suggest a fourth, fundamentally human capacity along with the three you mentioned: vulnerability. Or put more concretely, "sensitivity to consequences." This speaks to yet another dimension of care, relating to embodiment. We not only care about excellence and meaning, but that we have existential and/or personal stakes in what happens to us and those we care about.
This is a long piece expressing something important but like the system it critiques lacks connection. With you sitting next to me, touching my hand as we work and considering together this huge dilemmas , what does it mean? And is there a deeper recognition of this already worked out in the history of the human love of knowledge—philo-sophy? Isn’t there? Where is the collective and the collective energy behind your words? Wouldn’t I already be there? That is if it is true? I want to invite you to live into this together, where it is already alive and we are already aware, even if only prematurely, still, so we can move together into the emergence within the emergentcy. :)
Data IS You - the book has answered many of your posed questions;
- privatization personal data (data dividend)
- first-person datasets (store-of-value)
- Persons Asset Class (transactional)
- Intellectual Teleology (scientific category)
An excerpt from the chapter, "Final Thoughts": "To live authentically in the digital age is to recognize that our data is not just a reflection but an extension of our being—a responsibility as profound as our own existence."
Happy to send you the book!