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R. Sihvonen's avatar

Great stuff, Ida! I agree with everything except the first paragraph. To me this "AI doing most of our work" is just a Silicon Valley pipe dream with a dystopian flare. It's riding the wave of the industrial "efficiency" (read, productivity) fetish, where meaning is important only if it can add to the quantifiable. Personally I'm not touching gen AI for several reasons, but one of the most pressing ones is that I've noticed that it strips me of my agency and opportunities to keep learning by doing.

So to me it's all about rediscovering the meaning and the agency _in work_ instead of automating everything for everyone to become artists. To become artists _in work_. In reality, without a heavy focus on structural changes, the "efficiency" fetish will just push human labor to new things, and the promise of more free time will only be met somewhere at the top, for those who own and control these technologies. Gotta pay to use them, right?

Of course it's not all black and white and some work just makes sense to automate, but the meaning discussion must be extended to work as well. If I understood correctly, you're referring to this too with "building companies, creating a home". All I know is that I find meaning in filling spreadsheets, completing to-do lists, and especially responding to emails that _people_ have sent me.

But you're definitely onto something important here, will be keeping an eye on this space :)

PS. I take it that you've left Sane. Is the project dead now?

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