The part after this
The courage
to be human.
Once machines do all the processing, the point of work won’t be what you can produce. It’ll be who you are.
Run the trend all the way out — past the next ten years, to the part after that, when the tools are no longer impressive and a staggering amount of work simply happens without anyone touching it.
What is the point of work at all, when the work can do itself?
What gets cheap
AI commoditizes transactions.
Anything that is fundamentally a transaction — a thing produced, a number crunched, a task executed, a document generated — is exactly what these systems are best at, and they’ll do it for almost nothing.
Processing.
Producing.
Calculating.
Drafting.
Generating.
So the economic value of performing transactions falls toward zero. That’s the whole arc — even the exciting middle of it: the builder who does the work of fifty is still, in the end, orchestrating transactions. And eventually those get cheap too.
What stays rare
The only scarce thing is whatever isn’t a transaction.
And that turns out to be the human stuff. A person you actually trust. A community you belong to. A point of view that’s truly yours, and not the average of everything ever written.
Trust.
Belonging.
Taste.
Point of view.
Presence.
Work stops being about what you can produce — machines win that, decisively — and starts being about who you are and who you’re connected to. Attention. Audience. Community. Networking, but in the true sense of the word: not business cards, a tribe.
Two paths
There are really only two ways to be valuable.
Path one
Be the source.
The rare human who knows one thing so deeply that you are the thing the model trained on.
Path two
Be the one people stand near.
Someone other people want to listen to, follow, and trust. Known and chosen for who you are, not what you can make.
Both are versions of the same thing — being undeniably, specifically human in a world drowning in the generic.
Here’s the part that makes it hard
Being human takes courage.
The transactional world let you hide. You could be a function, a competent and anonymous producer of outputs, and that was enough.
The new world doesn’t let you hide. It asks you to have an actual identity. A point of view you’ll stand behind. The nerve to put yourself out there and be known, to build something real with other people and risk that it doesn’t work.
That’s uncomfortable in a way that simply doing the work never was. It is, plainly, the harder path.
When the producing is finally infinite, what’s left is each other.
Transactions are done by machines now. Relationships aren't. Connection isn't. Belonging isn't. The future of work might turn out to be the oldest human thing there is — to be known, to be trusted, and to matter to the people around you.