[Note: Yo! Haven't posted in about three years, but I'm still here.]
Can AI make us more human? This question keeps circling in my head.
It sounds contradictory, but maybe it’s not.
The more I use AI—and the more I see how people are using it to create—the more it gets me thinking about what it even means to be human. To make things. To care about things. And I start to wonder if those ideas are starting to shift.
AI is pretty incredible. It still surprises me almost every week. Speed, power, accessibility—it’s all moving really fast. I use it regularly for client work, project management, ideation. It’s made parts of my job easier and faster. And I’m not precious about tools. I don’t think there’s a single, pure way to be creative.
But still, something feels different.
When I see or read AI-generated work, it’s no doubt impressive. There’s a bit of magic there. But the awe fades quickly. So far, the work doesn’t feel like it carries the same kind of emotional or physical investment I usually connect to powerful creative work.
That’s not a moral judgment—just an observation.
Lately, I’ve been spending more time on physical forms of creating—woodworking, building objects, using tools that require slowing down and messing up. That kind of making is clunky and imperfect. But it feels personal and lasting. I feel very present.
Exploring slower, hands-on ways of creating, while also diving deeper into AI, has brought up even more questions for me:
Does art still require effort to be meaningful?
Do we need to redefine what effort is? What craft is? What creativity is?
What makes something more or less valuable?
Is it okay if the answers are messy and depend on context?
And then, bigger still:
If our careers, skills, and outputs are increasingly aided or replaced by machines, what happens to our identities?
Do we stop defining ourselves by our jobs?
Do we find new anchors—in community, in hobbies, in something else?
I’m not here to resist AI.
I’m not here to romanticize the past.
I’m here to stay curious about where we’re going—and stay grounded in what matters along the way.
But I also don’t think we can ignore the very real disruptions ahead. Jobs will change or disappear. Industries will shift. And some people will be harmed more than others.
A lot of these decisions will be out of our control—made by companies and governments that don’t always have the collective good in mind.
But we can still decide how we respond.
We can still choose what kind of meaning we want outside of productivity.
We can still define ourselves as people, not just as workers.
We’re still people who build, explore, laugh, connect, create—sometimes with machines, sometimes without.
That doesn’t make the future any less uncertain. And honestly, based on what I’ve seen with other technologies, I’m cautious about where AI might take us. Technology tends to amplify whatever’s already there—for better and for worse. We’ve seen that with social media. We’ve seen it with other shifts. And it’s hard not to imagine AI heading down some of the same paths.
That’s also why it feels important to come back to what I can control.
I can’t stop the technology. I can’t predict where it’ll lead.
But I can stay clear about the kind of life I want to build.
I can loosen the grip between my identity and my work.
I can rediscover creativity just for the sake of it.
I don’t know exactly where that leads.
But I’m still figuring it out.
And the questions feel worth staying with.