AI and the End of Busywork

The panic about AI is mostly a panic about identity.

For a hundred years we told people that the dignity of work came from doing the work. AI is now showing us that most of what we called work was actually overhead — moving information, formatting documents, repeating ourselves in slightly different ways.

What Actually Disappears

The parts of every job that disappear first are the parts no one liked: the status reports, the meeting recaps, the first drafts, the data cleanup. What's left is the part that requires judgment — and judgment is what scales human leverage.

The Real Question

The interesting question isn't will AI replace me. It's what would I build if every routine task in my life took five seconds instead of five hours. That's the question worth sitting with.