I just went through an emergency surgery and it was the first time we talked since, so he asked the obvious thing: did the anesthesia knock something loose, or am I blocking memories? Fair question. What I meant was simpler and stranger. I’m sitting on the cusp of 40 and I can’t account for the distance. I can name the milestones. I can’t feel the road between them.

I’m part of the last group that got a few years of life before any of this, having a childhood that was reliant on being outside or being bored. The TV running nothing but infomercials after the local station asked if my parents knew where their kids were. I remember the first home computer showing up in the house. I remember writing basic programs in a school computer lab and being floored that the machine did what I told it. I remember building websites for no reason, decorating a MySpace page, watching social media switch on like a light, and then one ordinary afternoon downloading ChatGPT from the app store and poking at it, wondering what it was about to do to everything. What I don’t remember is how I got from that lab to here this fast.

People keep asking if AI scares me. It does, but not the way they mean. I’m not waiting for the robots to rise, and I don’t think we should stop building it. The fear is quieter than that and harder to say out loud: when a tool lets you do in a day what used to take a month, the question stops being “what can I make” and becomes “how do I take care of myself inside that.” We spend all our worry on which jobs go away and where the human still fits. Nobody budgets for what it does to a person to suddenly be this capable.

Here’s the thing I didn’t have at 25. When you’re a kid, you look at your parents and their friends and you assume every adult has it figured out. I have two kids now. We do not have it figured out. I’m smarter than I was, steadier, the bank account makes more sense, and I am still guessing, still pulling things apart to see how they work. That turns out to be the whole job of being a person. AI didn’t change it. It just handed me a faster way to chase.

So no, I don’t think it’s an easy button for life. I can build a web app. I can wire up automations that talk to five systems and clean up after each other. I can generate the cheesy art at the top of these posts all day. What I can’t do is write a song. I can ask Suno to write one, and it will, and I will sit there unable to tell you if it’s any good. That’s what people miss when they say AI replaces the skill. Garbage in, garbage out still holds. You need enough underlying knowledge to know when the model has quietly driven into a ditch. With the song I have none, so I’m helpless. With the web app I have enough to catch it. The skill didn’t disappear. It moved.

This is also why most of what I scroll past makes me a little sad. I open LinkedIn and it’s a flood of slop, people automating their own engagement and getting none back. Everybody wants to be seen. Nobody gets seen by handing the seeing to a machine. The whole reason any of this is worth doing is the human on the other end, and you can feel it the second that human leaves the building.

I won’t pretend the capability isn’t intoxicating. I’ve roughly 10x’d what I can get through in a day, and some nights that means I keep going long past when I should stop, because the next problem is right there and it’s too cool to walk away from. Am I working later than I used to? Some days. And some days I close the laptop at 5 and go find my kids, because I already did more before lunch than my five-years-ago self managed by midnight. Both are true in the same week. That isn’t a contradiction to resolve. It’s just the shape of the thing.

I watched clips from a local board meeting about a proposed data center recently. I can see both sides. I get the environmental load. I get not wanting that humming in your backyard. What stuck with me wasn’t the issue. It was who was fighting. The loudest voices split into two camps: people who’ve decided change is the enemy because they can’t keep pace with it, and people at the very start who are scared for the planet they’re inheriting. Both righteous. Both, in most of the clips, arguing about a thing neither had fully sat with. We’ve gotten divisive about being divisive. The internet trained us to pick the side before we’ve done the reading.

It’s the same move every time a tool gets big enough to matter. We built steamships to cross the ocean faster, trains to cross the country, cars to make the ordinary day easier, home computers to talk to people past our own street. Every one came with a real cost and a real fight, and every time we found a way to keep the good and manage the harm. Not cleanly. But we did it.

AI is not the answer to what’s wrong with us as a society. It isn’t, and it won’t be. But that’s the wrong size of question. It doesn’t have to be the answer to be an answer to something specific. If it gets us a step closer to a cancer treatment that keeps someone’s mother around another five years, that counts. If it unlocks school for a kid whose ADHD has been treated like a character flaw, that counts too. Speaking from experience, battling for the B's every year. If it gives someone who can’t speak a way to be heard, that’s not nothing. We keep reaching for the verdict, thumbs up or thumbs down on the whole technology, when the honest answer lives in the gray.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. The machine is fast and tireless, and that is genuinely useful. What it can’t do is care whether the song is any good, whether the client actually needed the contract you just archived, whether this is the hill worth the fight. That judgment is still ours. The context is the whole game. It always was.

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