A quick note before we start. I wrote this by hand, based on a voice note I recorded while driving home from a colleague. I used AI — Opus 4.8 on extra-high thinking — to help me ideate, fix my grammar, and shape it here and there. But it has been fully read, approved, and posted by me, a human. I used AI as a tool, not as a replacement for thinking. More on why that matters later.

This is a braindump. It’s a rough sketch, purely for my little blog. The wording still needs work, but I think the essence is there. On my drive home I started thinking about the future and what I personally expect from it, and really, about one thing: in a time of AI, what makes us human, and what happens to work.

My first bet bet: AI will make the job market tighter

My main bet is that AI is going to make the labor market tighter, not looser. The reason isn’t that AI replaces tasks, though it will. It’s that people will start feeling more undervalued, and the pressure to compete with each other will go up. That pushes people in two directions.

You get the top performers on one end and the people at the bottom on the other. And I think the people right in the middle are actually the safest.

The very knowledgeable people get automated away by cheaper solutions: an expensive, smart employee gets replaced by a less expensive but equally smart AI. The lower-skilled (but socially perfectly fine) people get automated away by slightly more expensive solutions that are a lot more capable, and that pull the quality back up. That leaves the middle ground. You’re not too expensive, and you’re not too cheap. You’re the hardest to replace.

The real danger: burnout and bore-out

For both ends, the same danger shows up. Either people get walked all over, or they get under-challenged, because suddenly everything is possible through a computer, an AI, in this case. And I think the real risk lives exactly there: in burnout and bore-out.

I think we’ll end up with a tighter job market, because more people drop out due to automation. Fewer people are then available, so we lean even harder on AI to replace them. And that catalyzes itself into something close to self-destruction. People get replaced, the people who stay get less fulfillment from their work, and that tips them into burnout or — more often, I think — bore-out, because they get less and less satisfaction from what they do. Round and round it goes.

What survives is what you bring as a person

Here’s the flip side. In the age of AI, I think what you bring as a person becomes the most important thing of all. Who you are. How you behave. How you carry yourself. Because in the end, you want to work with people.

You’ll get companies that start with two people and stay that way. You’ll get billion-dollar SaaS products built like that, absolutely. But the companies that have been around a bit longer have tasted what it’s actually like to work with people. So short term, you cut people’s jobs. Long term, you find out that even though AI is a tool, it can never fully replace a human when it comes to fulfillment. And fulfillment, I think, becomes the most important thing for keeping people around.

Even if a skill like programming becomes banal and fades away, and I do believe programming as a profession will go away, the net result is fewer people in the market actually building and creating, because people drop out. Short term, everything goes up. Long term, everything comes down. That’s the bet I want to place.

The sad part: the market is financially driven

The sad thing is that the market is mostly driven by money. Big software companies are raising enormous amounts right now to automate certain things away, and I think they’ll break the market, and the world, before AI ever really gets to show its good side. I’ll probably find that very sad, and I’ll have to make my peace with it. You can be a counter-voice, but you’re not going to stop it. If you could, we’d maybe have been better off resisting every revolution, and I’m not so sure we’d have ended up where we could have.

AI has the chance to cure cancer. But I think the financial incentive, to first milk it for every bit of money possible, weighs so much heavier than doing good for people. Which is somewhat understandable. You’re just a software company building cool stuff. When you see it being used, maybe you get your fulfillment from that. But the world itself might not.

The hope: monitor how happy people are

So I hope we can get ahead of this by monitoring how happy people actually are. AI has the chance to improve the world, but it has just as much of a chance to wreck it. It’ll do that on the climate front too, though, in this context, I honestly don’t care about the climate angle. What I care about here is AI wrecking people. It can do so much damage, and we can get ahead of it simply by sharing knowledge. Happiness should be a KPI.

My own near bore-out, I think.

I’ll be honest about my own experience. For a while, I didn’t enjoy programming with AI at all, even if it might have looked like I did. I think I sat right on the edge of a bore-out. Not in the sense that I stopped enjoying it, I knew I had to find my way through it. But if you don’t know there’s a way out, or you can’t feel one coming, that can be the reason you think: I’m going to quit, I’m done, I’ll pull the feeling out of it. And then you slip into a somewhat negative spiral you might not be able to lift yourself out of, because you never saw it coming.

In the end, I found my way, and a workflow that works for me. Of course, you might ask: what’s that workflow? And I have to admit, I don’t think it would be useful to share that workflow. Every human is different, thinks differently, does things differently.

I just know everyone can. I’m mostly scared for the people who don’t reach that insight and think, “programming (or another thing) is my life”, because it costs you so much energy.

Reconnect with why you started

Maybe the reason you started programming is that you wanted to make things. So you have to get back in touch with the reason you started making things in the first place, not with the programming itself, even if that’s what gave you the “this is cool” feeling. Why can’t you build cool things without the programming part? The steps are just different. They might be shorter, and the impact can be so much bigger.

I think that’s what really matters: during the act of creating, the passion for creating has to come back. And that’s allowed to happen with AI. You can say, “soon AI will be able to do everything a human can.” Fine, then it can. Then you, as a programmer or a builder, can copy yourself endlessly to reach what you, as a builder, want to reach. That should become the starting point of the world.

It shouldn’t be “programming is my goal,” because that scales linearly: the more time you put in, the more you can do. With AI it can scale exponentially. The more you want to build, the more you can realize, the more you can improve the world, piece by piece.

And then, unfortunately, the goal becomes making money again, because that’s what the world is built on. Although, if the world didn’t have that incentive, and everyone had access to AI (even just from the government, to create whatever they want), I think we could build a far more beautiful world together. But then maybe the goal, the experience, the soul behind why you create slips away again. Because right now you have a goal: you want to be able to do more in life, reach more. And that’s a beautiful kind of roadmap, too. I don’t have an answer for how we ever get to a balanced place, where people can do what they want without a reason behind it, and without feeling forced into it. That’s really hard.

Which, of course, brings me to the Bee Movie

And we’ve seen this, very silly, in the Bee Movie. In the film, the bees who produce everything are having a great time at work. They fly around the world and genuinely enjoy it, even as pilots. Then they find out their honey is being used by others, that they’re being milked dry. So they fight back, they sue, and they win. But winning is exactly what does them in: the honey comes flooding back, there’s suddenly nothing left to produce, and they go lazy and lose their spark. Without the bees working, pollination stops, and the world slowly grinds toward dying.

That balancing act is going to be the hard part with AI. AI does your work, you don’t have to anymore, you go lazy, you lose your spark, even if you’re technically doing things like sitting in the sun or your own hobby projects. The spark drops out. And maybe we don’t have an answer for that, beyond trying to keep intact what we have now. Because in the film, I can’t quite remember exactly how it ends, they do eventually start producing again and find their spark back. And of course “Here Comes the Sun” plays, because they’ve found their spark again. 🐝

The spark bubble is going to burst

I think we, as a society, are going to get tangled up in this. All of us, or a big part of us, are going to lose our spark, and I hope the counter-movement becomes about creating spark. The exact shape of that, time will tell, but I know we’re going to live through it.

There’s going to be a huge backlash against data centers, against AI, and attempts at legislation to delay it all. But at some point it pops. Not necessarily the financial bubble, I don’t really believe that just falls apart, but the spark bubble. People lose their spark, and there’s going to be a big assignment for us as a society: giving form to that spark, and to what a human life is supposed to be.

Of course, ideals about that are spread all over the world, and they’re allowed to differ per person. I don’t think it should have a single starting point. It can differ per culture, per country. And I think it would be beautiful if, by the time we get there, everyone could travel freely between those countries to choose the path they want to walk. I don’t think it’ll be possible in my lifetime, but it would be fantastic if it ever was.

Be honest about using AI

This was just a braindump, and I hope I can make a nice story out of it together with AI. I think you have to be transparent about that. You shouldn’t pretend AI isn’t part of your work. It should just be logical, self-evident, that you use it. It shouldn’t be “I’m going to replace everything; I have a task, go build it.” That’s tempting sometimes, but that’s exactly when you lose the spark.

Even if pressing enter doesn’t always feel like working, it’s still being involved in the process of creation, and that is so incredibly important. Creation weighs heavier than output. You don’t need to know everything one-to-one; you never did. When you wrote a piece of software, you sometimes had to pull it back up just to walk through your own train of thought again. You’re not a computer, you can’t store it all, but you do have to have been involved.

It’s like a school project. Back in primary school, in high school, during my studies: if you weren’t involved in the creation process with your group, you could count on a question from the teacher you couldn’t answer. And just being able to show that you could give an answer, with a bit of extra knowledge behind it, weighs so much heavier. Whether the answer is exactly right is almost beside the point. At least you can speak to it, with conviction.

That’s what creates the spark: living through the creation process. Even watching a loading bar, testing, sparring with the AI, letting it test things, sending feedback back. That’s creation. It’s not about who ends up being the best architect from the top down, or who can ram the most tickets through. It’s the person who was most involved in the process of creating.

My TED Talk / manifesto

It’s so much more personal when you can tell a story about it and bring it to life. That’s what people want — the conviction, the motivation, the energy. You want to breathe it. That, really, should be the manifesto of life: you have to enjoy what you do, and it matters that you do.

Don’t take shortcuts in enjoying life. It’s such a waste, showing up to work unpassionate just to then do nothing. And even if you do nothing: doing nothing with passion beats doing things without it. The passionless version you won’t be able to keep up. Passionately doing nothing is, in a way, just doing something.

Passion is the most important thing a human has. Being involved, with passion. Passion is the meaning behind a person’s drive. If you do something, even if you’re the person who stands twenty-four hours a day just to stand, but you stand with passion, then you’ve discovered what it is to enjoy being human. Drawing energy from the smallest things. If you can stand and look out into the distance, tour around in nature, whatever it is you love, and do it with full conviction and passion, then you’ve made it.

So this was a bit of my TED Talk, my manifesto for life. You have to enjoy life. You have to share the passion. And things are allowed to be assisted by a computer, I won’t let anyone take that away. It’s not a contest over who can use AI the most. It’s a human contest over who can enjoy the process of creation the most. And that’s timeless. With every evolution, there have been the people who enjoyed the process, and they’re the ones who adapt to the new one most easily.

That was my TED Talk. I hope my lovely computer and I turned this a story you’ve enjoyed reading. Thank you.