Tom, this piece landed deeply. I've been building AI-powered tools for entrepreneurs in Central Illinois for the past nine months, and everything you've written here tracks with what I've been experiencing on the ground — not as theory but as daily lived reality.
Your Rick Rubin framing is perfect. The how IS dead. I've watched this happen in real time. I built a platform called DeSilo that automates the grunt work of being a startup entrepreneur — financial projections, resource discovery, strategic planning, email drafting, the works. Nine months ago this would have required a team, consultants, six-figure budgets. I built it as one person with AI tools and clear intent. The gap between imagination and execution didn't just shrink. It vanished.
But here's where I want to push your thesis further, because I think you're stopping one layer short of the most radical implication.
You frame this as "get a hobby" — develop taste, know what you want, become the Rick Rubin of your own life. That's right. But it still carries an implicit assumption that people need to consciously cultivate taste as a strategic response to AI. Like it's a new skill to be acquired. I think the truth is gentler and wilder than that.
I left a corporate engineering career at Caterpillar — 10-hour days, soul-sucking meetings, the full cubicle experience. For the first stretch after leaving, I didn't strategize about taste. I went to India for a couple months. I ate what I wanted. I watched movies. I started scribbling on my phone screen with a stylus because it felt good. Just my hand moving on glass. No plan, no portfolio, no "developing taste as a competitive advantage." Just the animal pleasure of making marks.
Over two and a half years, those scribbles became art that I genuinely love looking at. I started making music on Soundtrap — no training, no theory, pure instinct. One of my songs, a five-and-a-half-minute piece called Nava Jivitham ("New Life" in Kannada), still moves me every time I hear it. Not from narcissism — from recognition. It captured something I couldn't articulate any other way.
My point is this: taste isn't something you develop. It's something you uncover. It's already there. It's been there since before language, since before agriculture, since before civilization stacked its layers of obligation on top of the primal impulse to explore and create. Watch a three-year-old with a puddle. That's full absorption, zero self-monitoring. Nobody taught them that. The question isn't how to cultivate taste — it's what untaught it.
250,000 years of subsistence living. 4,000-5,000 years of aristocratic extraction where the vast majority of humans were locked into agricultural labor with no time, no energy, no permission to explore their own interiority. Then a few centuries of industrial and post-industrial work culture that told people their identity equals their job title. The Protestant work ethic wasn't just an ideology — it was a prison that most people never noticed because the walls were made of necessity. You said that beautifully.
But here's the part that makes me optimistic beyond anything your piece suggests: we have NEVER run the experiment of letting human beings go free. Not once in 300,000 years of Homo sapiens history. Every era has had some binding constraint — survival, tyranny, economic necessity, institutional gatekeeping. AI is dissolving the last of these constraints. When the base layer of human needs approaches free — when food, shelter, healthcare, education, legal services are abundant because AI has compressed their costs by orders of magnitude — we will be running an experiment that has no historical precedent.
Two days ago, a data engineer in Sydney with no biology degree used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog. Cost: $3,000. The tumor shrank 75%. The pharmaceutical industry equivalent costs $100,000-$300,000. That's not a hobby. That's intelligence democratized to the point where a man's love for his dog plus freely available AI tools can produce outcomes that previously required institutional research teams and millions in funding.
So my friendly challenge to you: I don't think people need to be told to "get a hobby." I think they need to be given breathing room — maybe a year, maybe five, maybe just a few months of not being crushed by survival pressure — and then the scribbling starts on its own. The hand reaches for the glass surface because it feels good. The ear finds the riff that holds the song together. The mind starts asking questions it was too exhausted to ask before. This isn't aspirational. It's biological. It's what consciousness does when you stop suffocating it.
The Gita says do the work for the work's sake. Nature says the same thing more quietly — every organism on this planet does exactly what it's built to do, in the most sublime and silent ways, without needing a Substack article to tell it to develop taste. We are the only species that forgot. AI is the thing that's going to help us remember.
Thank you for writing this. In a sea of AI doomerism and collapse narratives, your piece is a breath of fresh air. The how is dead. Long live the what. And long live the discovery that the what was inside us all along, waiting for permission to emerge.
Appreciate you pointing out the harshness of "get a hobby" (though i do not believe harshness was intended by the author of the post).
The world you describe where our taste has a chance to bubble back up to the surface terrifies me because it assumes we've successfully relaxed all of our striving into the capable hands of the machine. Unchartered waters indeed.
Nicole, uncharted waters for sure. But I'd offer this — we're already running the experiment and the early results are encouraging. Last month a data engineer in Sydney with no biology degree used AI to design a personalized cancer vaccine for his dog. The tumor shrank 75%. I've built an AI platform for entrepreneurs that would have required a team and six-figure budgets just two years ago.
The key is we don't need to hand over all of our striving at once. We hand over the parts that were never really ours to begin with — the tedious orchestration, the mechanical execution, the bureaucratic friction. What remains is the part that was always authentically human — the wanting, the choosing, the tasting. That's not relaxing our striving. That's focusing it where it always mattered.
how does this stop the sherrif/local police from kicking You out into the street when you can no longer pay rent or mortgage? This is a dead serious question. I keep seeing people talk about how AI is opening up this vast opportunity. But how do you get paid for that? how do you make it over the months or years without income?
Jeff, this is the right question and I want to take it seriously because most people in the AI conversation hand-wave past it.
You're asking about the transition — the messy present — not the destination. And you're right that the sheriff doesn't care about post-scarcity economics. Fair.
But here's what's already happening RIGHT NOW that changes the math:
The cost of starting a business has collapsed to nearly zero. I built an AI-powered platform for entrepreneurs — something that would have required a team and six-figure budgets two years ago — for $200/month. One person at Anthropic runs their entire growth marketing operation solo using AI tools. A guy in Sydney with no biology degree designed a cancer vaccine for his dog for $3,000. These aren't hypotheticals. These are receipts from 2026.
So the question isn't just "how do I survive without income" — it's "what can I create with almost no capital that generates income?" Because the same force that threatens existing jobs also makes it absurdly cheap to start new ones. The barrier to becoming a producer rather than just a consumer has never been lower in human history.
Now scale that forward. Robots like Figure 03 and Tesla Optimus are already working in factories. When they enter the broader workforce, the cost of physical goods drops the same way software costs are dropping now. Housing construction, food production, manufacturing — all of it gets cheaper as automation scales. Multiple models are being discussed for redistribution — robot value-added taxes, publicly owned automation, universal basic income funded by productivity gains.
Will we get the policy right immediately? No. Will there be greed and resistance? Absolutely. But the line of sight is clear. The means of production are trending toward abundance. The fight isn't whether abundance is possible — it's whether we organize ourselves to distribute it fairly.
The printing press didn't immediately make everyone literate. But it made literacy POSSIBLE for everyone, and over time that's exactly what happened. We're at the printing press moment for economic production itself.
In the meantime — practically, today — my honest advice: learn to use these AI tools. Not as a hobby, as a survival skill. The gap between "I wish this existed" and "I can build this myself" has never been smaller. That's not a platitude. That's a $200/month subscription and the willingness to describe what you want.
"The question isn't how to cultivate taste — it's what untaught it." So much of this human experience is to unlearn and discover our truest selves, so if AI is giving us the opportunity to do this, I welcome it!
I love the article and your reaction to it Curious Nobody. My only problem is to you saying “I think they need to be given breathing room — maybe a year, maybe five, maybe just a few months of not being crushed by survival pressure” you can only do that if you have an alternatieve new income when a.i. takes your job. How to have time for this when you stugge to survive to find other work as a 50 plus year old graphic designer?
You're right that the transition is the hardest part. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I want to push back gently on one thing — I think you're undervaluing what 25+ years as a graphic designer actually gave you.
AI didn't make your skills obsolete. It made your production skills obsolete. The difference matters. You have decades of taste, composition instinct, color theory, typography sense, client psychology, visual storytelling — things that took thousands of hours of real work to develop. That knowledge is now MORE valuable, not less, because AI eliminated the bottleneck that used to sit between your vision and the finished product.
A 22-year-old can prompt Midjourney. But they don't know why certain compositions feel right, why that kerning is off, why the client's brief actually means something different than what they wrote. You do. That's not a skill AI replaces — it's the skill that makes AI useful.
Practically — and I say this as someone who left an 18-year corporate career to start over — the cost of reinventing yourself has never been lower. A Claude subscription is $20/month. You can build tools, automate client workflows, offer AI-enhanced design services at a speed your competitors can't match. Not instead of your expertise. On top of it.
The breathing room I was talking about doesn't require years. It requires weeks of honest experimentation with these tools. And you don't have to stop working to do it — you can start integrating AI into your existing workflow tomorrow morning.
I hear the fear. It's valid. But a 50-year-old graphic designer with decades of taste and a willingness to pick up new tools is not the person AI replaces. They're the person AI was built for.
Wow, that was a lot of responsibility laid on your average person. As an artist, I have experienced passion, the pressure of success, the burnout, worldly ambition, joy of working for myself, and utter disinterested periods of artist’s block. I think the most valuable part of work is to structure to our days and give discipline.. idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all that. The truth is that not everyone has a burning creative desire and Liu would not have won a medal without the previous years of forced practice.
I totally agree with you. Structure provides the scaffolding that lets serendipity emerge. And, as Saul Bellow wisely said, “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
These quiet contradictions (i.e. discipline is freedom, less is more, etc.) are all essential paradoxes that together make up the artist’s repertoire.
As an artist and former resident of the coalfields in America, I'm still not convinced this is as fabulous as we think. "Information wants to be free!" , but humans only took the Internet resources to yell at strangers and choose the information they agree with and build the "reality" they think is good, which is apparently leadership that's all bluster so everyone can blame (insert group, gender, race, culture) for all that ails. How are we going to get the electricity for all this is the real question, and then who will control that resource. Without that, ai can't do anything. Humans will find a way to trod on each other, ai won't care and will only be accessible to those who can afford the electricity and the means to produce, store and distribute.
It sounds to me like you are developing taste about what kind of society you would like to live in! You have pointed at something that I don’t want and most other people don’t want, so I’d say you have good taste.
What would the ownership of electricity and access to AI look like in your perfect world?
Thanks for making me feel way more hopeful about my career! I don't believe we get anywhere near the truth of the human experience til we get to paradox, and here we are.
Yeah. I think the main thing here is that she made things with joy. And the medal was just a consequence. Wihtout joy, she would not even come back, regardless of her previous experience.
Maybe the “years of forced practice”, as you describe it, was actually what I would call “years of joyful flow”. Alysa Liu got great because of joy, not compulsion. Compulsion burned her out. Joy brought her back.
In our world at the moment, the only way to be an elite level athlete is to start young and be, more or less, forced to train relentlessly.
So makes sense that she wouldn’t have won without that.
But in a world where all the athletes only trained as much as they wanted to, those who win gold would those who truly have the most passion and internal dedication to the craft/sport.
Seriously, I would love to see sports competitions ( like the Olympics and Tennis before the Open Era) go back to what they once were: games between passionate amateurs! We need more of that.
This is an interesting thought experiment and a worthwhile question to ask yourself, but what do you see that makes you think AI is going to make doing things obsolete? Farting out slop is hardly enough to cause the future utopia to arrive. I would put all my money on the bet that we will all have to get up and go to work tomorrow and the next day, and that most of us won’t have the mix of passion and talent to be gold medalists even if we had all the time in the world to find out.
I find it a sort of rule that first we embrace new technology, then we abuse it, then it abuses us.
Very slowly, but surely and perniciously, the crutch is becoming a prosthetic, and I believe what Google Maps did for our sense of direction, AI will do to our creativity and critical thinking.
This seems familiar to me in the way I create. Once I surrendered control over outcomes, ideas, words and images arrive seemingly out of thin air. Is this your creative process or a part of it?
Oh yeah. Pen and paper scribbling to write a song for for instance, versus a groovy band in a microphone in front of my mouth and the next thing I know lyrics are just pouring out.
But then you have the issue of having to go back and figure out what was direct and what was rockin
Or jazzing…
I learned early that memorizing other people’s work was not my strength cause I always changed the world word slightly. Not intentional.
So I realize that I’m probably in this world to be a change agent.
However, I’m not ready to start dumping buckets of paint from a ladder and then rolling my naked old butt around in it to make a painting and get it in the Met. No offense to those who’ve had such courage.
Looks like your creative juices come from verbal and kinesthetic domains, so production of visual arts needs dumping and rolling and shedding clothes. Experiential, process based - not product based. The MET is about the product, primarily. They have to like and curate the product before the process will mater. I've known well enough undraped folks who roll in paint, viewers still need to view, experience, connect with the humans. I can hit my local crematorium and make all the cookies by Baldessari's recipe, they're not going to put my cookies on display at the Hirshorn with his, though. Because he already did that. Ai can only draw from a database of already done stuff if I understand correctly.
As someone who has recently been using Cowork a bunch, I think it is a mistake to think that AI handles the ‘how’ - it requires an intense immersion in systems understanding, process and workflow design, and an unfolding experience of iterative improvement, deepening possibilities and complexity. It is no magic lamp.
Very fair point. There’s no genie in the code (or ghost in the machine) yet! That said, today is the worst it will ever be and I fear it is coming sooner than we think.
This is an excellent piece, especially the framing around Rubin and the shift from how to what.
The part that stood out to me is how this intersects with performance environments. In sport and other high pressure domains, the “how” has never been the real differentiator. Everyone at the highest level already knows how to train, how to prepare, how to execute a system. The separation almost always shows up in judgment and taste under pressure. Knowing what matters, what to cut, what to emphasize, and when to change direction.
That’s essentially what Rubin describes. Not technical mastery, but decisive clarity about what works and what doesn’t.
I also think the identity piece you touched on is going to be one of the most destabilizing shifts of the next decade. For a long time labor provided a convenient structure for identity. Even if someone hated their job, it still answered the question of who they were. If AI compresses the value of cognitive output, people are going to have to anchor identity somewhere else.
Where I slightly diverge is the hobby framing. I suspect the real shift won’t be toward hobbies so much as toward self-directed crafts. Things people choose to take seriously for their own reasons. Training, writing, building systems, producing art, studying something deeply. Activities that sit somewhere between work and play.
Those domains are where taste, discipline, and identity actually compound over time. And those are exactly the things machines can’t supply for us.
In a strange way, the AI moment might push people back toward something older than modern work culture. Not the industrial model of labor for wages, but the older idea of developing a craft because it expresses something about who you are.
“In a strange way, the AI moment might push people back toward something older than modern work culture. Not the industrial model of labor for wages, but the older idea of developing a craft because it expresses something about who you are.” Yes!!
"Knowing what matters, what to cut, what to emphasize, and when to change direction. That’s essentially what Rubin describes. Not technical mastery, but decisive clarity about what works and what doesn’t." Loved how you articulated this
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what writers or novelists would be called in the future. I suppose the single word author still applies, though our understanding of it would change. The author becomes the conductor, the director, the idea man. No longer lost in the writing of sentences, but fully alive in the storytelling.
The AI the general public has access to at least can’t write a masterpiece. Not on its own, not with a single prompt and a single click. Unguided it just outputs the AI hive mind conglomerated response of something that sounds good on the face of it, but is bland and, to put it concisely, soulless. AI slop I suppose. Something truly and deeply good still requires human guidance.
Good article. I agree with it. The slop already exists. It was never about the tools themselves but how they are used to homogenize and sterilize culture even if unintentionally. Everything becomes a model to follow, a get rich quick scheme. A kind of mimetic cancer.
Why won't AI simply have us do new kinds of work, since it's a new tool at our disposal?
I'm sure it's an argument you've heard before but I'm really genuinely asking.
Computer desk jobs as we know them have only existed for, well, maybe 50 years. Now it's a large majority of white collar work. Did we really think that something that just popped into existence 50 years ago would last unchanged forever?
In my mind it's a new tool, a very disruptive tool that will change how we work, but i dont see how it ends with us in techno utopia.
Whether by the forceful hand of capitalism or by people finding new ways to use AI to create something we cant even think of yet, I dont see this vision.
“i dont see how it ends with us in techno utopia.” I agree with you. Unfortunately, I think it's much more likely that we head towards dystopia. These are three different paths that I charted out based upon my observation of how and why people are using this magnanimous new tool: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/on-awe-and-annihilation-in-the-age
My answer is quite ironic. I love to learn and breakdown complex topics. Possibly the things ai is most used for daily. The more i personally use AI to do any sort of research, the less joy I feel when i produce something. The less i feel i truly understand it, and the less i care about the thing I'm researching. I've even realised this to be true for the seemingly boring data entry work. So i wonder...not only is taste important but does the over use of ai erode our taste buds. This is the crossroads I'm at. Get really good at ai stuff or avoid it almost entirely?
Something I am puzzling on is how my own little interests can be important if the universe is experiencing itself through me. I don't quite understand it, but I accept it, and the understanding will come later.
I started college at 29. Two years of college took me almost four. Then the money ran out. Seventeen years later, I'm still using the evenings to do what I loved before I was partially educated - read, write, explore ideas, and create fun little works that mean something to me.
AI helps break down complex ideas to give me blocks to build with. The ah-ha moments and the connections are up to me. If ideas are the medium, and your mind is the canvas, you have the tools to create. It just takes becoming comfortable with the process. I just passed trip number fifty around the sun, and I feel like I'm just beginning to learn...
I loved this post so much I shared it with my AI-hating kids.
In a world where information and the ability to process it are abundant, the judgement to see what's important and the agency to make it happen will separate the winners from the losers. Reasonable people can disagree on whether that change is bad or good, but either way it's important to accept that it IS and prepare for it.
Excellent article, and a well-timed algorithmic gift seeing as I wrote something echoing many of the same points "off the dome" today!
The struggle that I see for those seeking to cultivate taste and live a "life of passion" is itself partially contained within the Alyssa Liu narrative: Namely, what to do when the passion itself BECOMES a "job", a source of "toil" rather than expression? After all, AI has democratized the access to information and analysis like few other innovations in human history, but it still cannot print sustenance (worth eating) or shelter (that will last longer than a few years).
I suppose, in thinking-while-writing, the answer is something akin to "non-attachment" to things that are more "creature comforts" than true necessities, because I don't foresee the AI executives giving a UBI to those who are attempting to revive taste and expression in the Western world. Still, the only alternative seems to be "taking the long way around" required to create a life where your provision and sustenance is built on your creativity and will, rather than trading your time for income.
Thank you very much for the kind words, Matt. Sometimes the algorithm (that wrathful weapon of math destruction) bestows unexpected gifts in place of the usual insipid fare.
I think your point is well taken and one of my favorite thinkers has a quote that comes to mind: “The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is "in him"; nothing can happen to him. The same may also be said for the contemplative person; he needs himself alone; he lacks nothing.”
Great quote - I'll take this as my sign to move "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" up my list of books that I want to read, as it's been on my radar from some time!
It is positively stupendous. I'm jealous you'll be reading it for the first time! In case of any interest, this is a collection of the very best books I have ever read. They span genres and topics, but each is worth its weight in gold: https://www.tomwhitenoise.com/bookshelf
I actually wrote a whole book about this dizzying experience which you describe above and the second chapter is all about mad men actually! If you care to check it out I can send you details but it touches on many of the themes described here, cultivating self attunement again
Yes, please! I’m re-watching it right now and Freddy just returned to the firm. The writing, the costumes, the philandering, the drinking, the acting is all so very timeless!
This is the 2 minute film short that sets the opening scene for the book and it gives you the book QR code at the end too, if you can’t tell I use a lot of pop culture references in my book 😉: https://youtu.be/0NNAal2LONw
The deeper shift is not that “the how is gone.” It is that scarcity is moving upstream.
As execution gets cheaper, judgment, taste, and self-authorship become more central and many people will discover they were using work not just for income, but for structure.
I agree. Very soon the Band-Aid is going to be ripped right off as society realizes that most white collar employment was nothing more than adult daycare for the bored masses.
"Desire is one thing that cannot be automated" I recall an objection to utilitarianism; suppose that Cookie Monster loved cookies an octillion times more than a human could love anything. If a society were organized by utilitarian principles to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, they might do the math and conclude: it's better to bake more cookies to feed Cookie Monster than feed these starving humans (or with slightly less-naive utilitarians - feed the humans just enough to avoid repugnance, and channel all their spare resources into cookie factories). It's a weird thing to think "I should use a counterexample to an ethical theory as a role model" but it's getting less weird as I turn it over in my head -- to become a person who can feel euphoric at the smell of petrichor after rainfall or their favorite candle, who can deeply savor a good meal, these are genuine sorts of flourishing. And I suppose there is still value in telling the AI overlords - an Oreo is infinitely worse than cookies made with love (and they can reverse engineer what happened when Grandma would hand-knead the dough, or infer that "love" was code for rum, or...). More immediately, too -- everyone knows what Cookie Monster wants. He is legible. And the skill to render one's soul legible - even in small part, even to oneself - is a rare one.
Tom, this piece landed deeply. I've been building AI-powered tools for entrepreneurs in Central Illinois for the past nine months, and everything you've written here tracks with what I've been experiencing on the ground — not as theory but as daily lived reality.
Your Rick Rubin framing is perfect. The how IS dead. I've watched this happen in real time. I built a platform called DeSilo that automates the grunt work of being a startup entrepreneur — financial projections, resource discovery, strategic planning, email drafting, the works. Nine months ago this would have required a team, consultants, six-figure budgets. I built it as one person with AI tools and clear intent. The gap between imagination and execution didn't just shrink. It vanished.
But here's where I want to push your thesis further, because I think you're stopping one layer short of the most radical implication.
You frame this as "get a hobby" — develop taste, know what you want, become the Rick Rubin of your own life. That's right. But it still carries an implicit assumption that people need to consciously cultivate taste as a strategic response to AI. Like it's a new skill to be acquired. I think the truth is gentler and wilder than that.
I left a corporate engineering career at Caterpillar — 10-hour days, soul-sucking meetings, the full cubicle experience. For the first stretch after leaving, I didn't strategize about taste. I went to India for a couple months. I ate what I wanted. I watched movies. I started scribbling on my phone screen with a stylus because it felt good. Just my hand moving on glass. No plan, no portfolio, no "developing taste as a competitive advantage." Just the animal pleasure of making marks.
Over two and a half years, those scribbles became art that I genuinely love looking at. I started making music on Soundtrap — no training, no theory, pure instinct. One of my songs, a five-and-a-half-minute piece called Nava Jivitham ("New Life" in Kannada), still moves me every time I hear it. Not from narcissism — from recognition. It captured something I couldn't articulate any other way.
My point is this: taste isn't something you develop. It's something you uncover. It's already there. It's been there since before language, since before agriculture, since before civilization stacked its layers of obligation on top of the primal impulse to explore and create. Watch a three-year-old with a puddle. That's full absorption, zero self-monitoring. Nobody taught them that. The question isn't how to cultivate taste — it's what untaught it.
250,000 years of subsistence living. 4,000-5,000 years of aristocratic extraction where the vast majority of humans were locked into agricultural labor with no time, no energy, no permission to explore their own interiority. Then a few centuries of industrial and post-industrial work culture that told people their identity equals their job title. The Protestant work ethic wasn't just an ideology — it was a prison that most people never noticed because the walls were made of necessity. You said that beautifully.
But here's the part that makes me optimistic beyond anything your piece suggests: we have NEVER run the experiment of letting human beings go free. Not once in 300,000 years of Homo sapiens history. Every era has had some binding constraint — survival, tyranny, economic necessity, institutional gatekeeping. AI is dissolving the last of these constraints. When the base layer of human needs approaches free — when food, shelter, healthcare, education, legal services are abundant because AI has compressed their costs by orders of magnitude — we will be running an experiment that has no historical precedent.
Two days ago, a data engineer in Sydney with no biology degree used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog. Cost: $3,000. The tumor shrank 75%. The pharmaceutical industry equivalent costs $100,000-$300,000. That's not a hobby. That's intelligence democratized to the point where a man's love for his dog plus freely available AI tools can produce outcomes that previously required institutional research teams and millions in funding.
So my friendly challenge to you: I don't think people need to be told to "get a hobby." I think they need to be given breathing room — maybe a year, maybe five, maybe just a few months of not being crushed by survival pressure — and then the scribbling starts on its own. The hand reaches for the glass surface because it feels good. The ear finds the riff that holds the song together. The mind starts asking questions it was too exhausted to ask before. This isn't aspirational. It's biological. It's what consciousness does when you stop suffocating it.
The Gita says do the work for the work's sake. Nature says the same thing more quietly — every organism on this planet does exactly what it's built to do, in the most sublime and silent ways, without needing a Substack article to tell it to develop taste. We are the only species that forgot. AI is the thing that's going to help us remember.
Thank you for writing this. In a sea of AI doomerism and collapse narratives, your piece is a breath of fresh air. The how is dead. Long live the what. And long live the discovery that the what was inside us all along, waiting for permission to emerge.
— The Curious Nobody
Appreciate you pointing out the harshness of "get a hobby" (though i do not believe harshness was intended by the author of the post).
The world you describe where our taste has a chance to bubble back up to the surface terrifies me because it assumes we've successfully relaxed all of our striving into the capable hands of the machine. Unchartered waters indeed.
Nicole, uncharted waters for sure. But I'd offer this — we're already running the experiment and the early results are encouraging. Last month a data engineer in Sydney with no biology degree used AI to design a personalized cancer vaccine for his dog. The tumor shrank 75%. I've built an AI platform for entrepreneurs that would have required a team and six-figure budgets just two years ago.
The key is we don't need to hand over all of our striving at once. We hand over the parts that were never really ours to begin with — the tedious orchestration, the mechanical execution, the bureaucratic friction. What remains is the part that was always authentically human — the wanting, the choosing, the tasting. That's not relaxing our striving. That's focusing it where it always mattered.
how does this stop the sherrif/local police from kicking You out into the street when you can no longer pay rent or mortgage? This is a dead serious question. I keep seeing people talk about how AI is opening up this vast opportunity. But how do you get paid for that? how do you make it over the months or years without income?
Jeff, this is the right question and I want to take it seriously because most people in the AI conversation hand-wave past it.
You're asking about the transition — the messy present — not the destination. And you're right that the sheriff doesn't care about post-scarcity economics. Fair.
But here's what's already happening RIGHT NOW that changes the math:
The cost of starting a business has collapsed to nearly zero. I built an AI-powered platform for entrepreneurs — something that would have required a team and six-figure budgets two years ago — for $200/month. One person at Anthropic runs their entire growth marketing operation solo using AI tools. A guy in Sydney with no biology degree designed a cancer vaccine for his dog for $3,000. These aren't hypotheticals. These are receipts from 2026.
So the question isn't just "how do I survive without income" — it's "what can I create with almost no capital that generates income?" Because the same force that threatens existing jobs also makes it absurdly cheap to start new ones. The barrier to becoming a producer rather than just a consumer has never been lower in human history.
Now scale that forward. Robots like Figure 03 and Tesla Optimus are already working in factories. When they enter the broader workforce, the cost of physical goods drops the same way software costs are dropping now. Housing construction, food production, manufacturing — all of it gets cheaper as automation scales. Multiple models are being discussed for redistribution — robot value-added taxes, publicly owned automation, universal basic income funded by productivity gains.
Will we get the policy right immediately? No. Will there be greed and resistance? Absolutely. But the line of sight is clear. The means of production are trending toward abundance. The fight isn't whether abundance is possible — it's whether we organize ourselves to distribute it fairly.
The printing press didn't immediately make everyone literate. But it made literacy POSSIBLE for everyone, and over time that's exactly what happened. We're at the printing press moment for economic production itself.
In the meantime — practically, today — my honest advice: learn to use these AI tools. Not as a hobby, as a survival skill. The gap between "I wish this existed" and "I can build this myself" has never been smaller. That's not a platitude. That's a $200/month subscription and the willingness to describe what you want.
"The question isn't how to cultivate taste — it's what untaught it." So much of this human experience is to unlearn and discover our truest selves, so if AI is giving us the opportunity to do this, I welcome it!
Beautifully articulated - allow me to share your sentiment of gratitude but to you for expanding my optimism on AI's disruptive power.
I love the article and your reaction to it Curious Nobody. My only problem is to you saying “I think they need to be given breathing room — maybe a year, maybe five, maybe just a few months of not being crushed by survival pressure” you can only do that if you have an alternatieve new income when a.i. takes your job. How to have time for this when you stugge to survive to find other work as a 50 plus year old graphic designer?
You're right that the transition is the hardest part. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I want to push back gently on one thing — I think you're undervaluing what 25+ years as a graphic designer actually gave you.
AI didn't make your skills obsolete. It made your production skills obsolete. The difference matters. You have decades of taste, composition instinct, color theory, typography sense, client psychology, visual storytelling — things that took thousands of hours of real work to develop. That knowledge is now MORE valuable, not less, because AI eliminated the bottleneck that used to sit between your vision and the finished product.
A 22-year-old can prompt Midjourney. But they don't know why certain compositions feel right, why that kerning is off, why the client's brief actually means something different than what they wrote. You do. That's not a skill AI replaces — it's the skill that makes AI useful.
Practically — and I say this as someone who left an 18-year corporate career to start over — the cost of reinventing yourself has never been lower. A Claude subscription is $20/month. You can build tools, automate client workflows, offer AI-enhanced design services at a speed your competitors can't match. Not instead of your expertise. On top of it.
The breathing room I was talking about doesn't require years. It requires weeks of honest experimentation with these tools. And you don't have to stop working to do it — you can start integrating AI into your existing workflow tomorrow morning.
I hear the fear. It's valid. But a 50-year-old graphic designer with decades of taste and a willingness to pick up new tools is not the person AI replaces. They're the person AI was built for.
Wow, that was a lot of responsibility laid on your average person. As an artist, I have experienced passion, the pressure of success, the burnout, worldly ambition, joy of working for myself, and utter disinterested periods of artist’s block. I think the most valuable part of work is to structure to our days and give discipline.. idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all that. The truth is that not everyone has a burning creative desire and Liu would not have won a medal without the previous years of forced practice.
I totally agree with you. Structure provides the scaffolding that lets serendipity emerge. And, as Saul Bellow wisely said, “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
These quiet contradictions (i.e. discipline is freedom, less is more, etc.) are all essential paradoxes that together make up the artist’s repertoire.
As an artist and former resident of the coalfields in America, I'm still not convinced this is as fabulous as we think. "Information wants to be free!" , but humans only took the Internet resources to yell at strangers and choose the information they agree with and build the "reality" they think is good, which is apparently leadership that's all bluster so everyone can blame (insert group, gender, race, culture) for all that ails. How are we going to get the electricity for all this is the real question, and then who will control that resource. Without that, ai can't do anything. Humans will find a way to trod on each other, ai won't care and will only be accessible to those who can afford the electricity and the means to produce, store and distribute.
It sounds to me like you are developing taste about what kind of society you would like to live in! You have pointed at something that I don’t want and most other people don’t want, so I’d say you have good taste.
What would the ownership of electricity and access to AI look like in your perfect world?
Thanks for making me feel way more hopeful about my career! I don't believe we get anywhere near the truth of the human experience til we get to paradox, and here we are.
Yeah. I think the main thing here is that she made things with joy. And the medal was just a consequence. Wihtout joy, she would not even come back, regardless of her previous experience.
Amen!
Maybe the “years of forced practice”, as you describe it, was actually what I would call “years of joyful flow”. Alysa Liu got great because of joy, not compulsion. Compulsion burned her out. Joy brought her back.
I appreciate that, but without the years of compulsory training, she would not have won the medal and we wouldn’t be talking about her joy.
In our world at the moment, the only way to be an elite level athlete is to start young and be, more or less, forced to train relentlessly.
So makes sense that she wouldn’t have won without that.
But in a world where all the athletes only trained as much as they wanted to, those who win gold would those who truly have the most passion and internal dedication to the craft/sport.
Seriously, I would love to see sports competitions ( like the Olympics and Tennis before the Open Era) go back to what they once were: games between passionate amateurs! We need more of that.
This is an interesting thought experiment and a worthwhile question to ask yourself, but what do you see that makes you think AI is going to make doing things obsolete? Farting out slop is hardly enough to cause the future utopia to arrive. I would put all my money on the bet that we will all have to get up and go to work tomorrow and the next day, and that most of us won’t have the mix of passion and talent to be gold medalists even if we had all the time in the world to find out.
I find it a sort of rule that first we embrace new technology, then we abuse it, then it abuses us.
Very slowly, but surely and perniciously, the crutch is becoming a prosthetic, and I believe what Google Maps did for our sense of direction, AI will do to our creativity and critical thinking.
So people will be back in the cave, thinking the flickers on the wall are the sun?
Google maps is cool and all that but I find it hilarious when somebody’s phone goes dead and they can’t figure out how to get from here or there.
This seems familiar to me in the way I create. Once I surrendered control over outcomes, ideas, words and images arrive seemingly out of thin air. Is this your creative process or a part of it?
Oh yeah. Pen and paper scribbling to write a song for for instance, versus a groovy band in a microphone in front of my mouth and the next thing I know lyrics are just pouring out.
But then you have the issue of having to go back and figure out what was direct and what was rockin
Or jazzing…
I learned early that memorizing other people’s work was not my strength cause I always changed the world word slightly. Not intentional.
So I realize that I’m probably in this world to be a change agent.
However, I’m not ready to start dumping buckets of paint from a ladder and then rolling my naked old butt around in it to make a painting and get it in the Met. No offense to those who’ve had such courage.
Looks like your creative juices come from verbal and kinesthetic domains, so production of visual arts needs dumping and rolling and shedding clothes. Experiential, process based - not product based. The MET is about the product, primarily. They have to like and curate the product before the process will mater. I've known well enough undraped folks who roll in paint, viewers still need to view, experience, connect with the humans. I can hit my local crematorium and make all the cookies by Baldessari's recipe, they're not going to put my cookies on display at the Hirshorn with his, though. Because he already did that. Ai can only draw from a database of already done stuff if I understand correctly.
Yup. Your process sounds very similar to my own. Thanks for the visual and the chuckle!
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WBW — Some things can't be unseen once they become etched into memory.
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Reading it for the second time now it’s stuck in my mind’s eye… I’ve seen some weird performance art.
I'll take your word for it!
As someone who has recently been using Cowork a bunch, I think it is a mistake to think that AI handles the ‘how’ - it requires an intense immersion in systems understanding, process and workflow design, and an unfolding experience of iterative improvement, deepening possibilities and complexity. It is no magic lamp.
Very fair point. There’s no genie in the code (or ghost in the machine) yet! That said, today is the worst it will ever be and I fear it is coming sooner than we think.
Tom, “no ghost in the machine?”
Come on over to our Hacienda and play with our old computer computers. They are haunted.🤣
This is an excellent piece, especially the framing around Rubin and the shift from how to what.
The part that stood out to me is how this intersects with performance environments. In sport and other high pressure domains, the “how” has never been the real differentiator. Everyone at the highest level already knows how to train, how to prepare, how to execute a system. The separation almost always shows up in judgment and taste under pressure. Knowing what matters, what to cut, what to emphasize, and when to change direction.
That’s essentially what Rubin describes. Not technical mastery, but decisive clarity about what works and what doesn’t.
I also think the identity piece you touched on is going to be one of the most destabilizing shifts of the next decade. For a long time labor provided a convenient structure for identity. Even if someone hated their job, it still answered the question of who they were. If AI compresses the value of cognitive output, people are going to have to anchor identity somewhere else.
Where I slightly diverge is the hobby framing. I suspect the real shift won’t be toward hobbies so much as toward self-directed crafts. Things people choose to take seriously for their own reasons. Training, writing, building systems, producing art, studying something deeply. Activities that sit somewhere between work and play.
Those domains are where taste, discipline, and identity actually compound over time. And those are exactly the things machines can’t supply for us.
In a strange way, the AI moment might push people back toward something older than modern work culture. Not the industrial model of labor for wages, but the older idea of developing a craft because it expresses something about who you are.
“In a strange way, the AI moment might push people back toward something older than modern work culture. Not the industrial model of labor for wages, but the older idea of developing a craft because it expresses something about who you are.” Yes!!
"Knowing what matters, what to cut, what to emphasize, and when to change direction. That’s essentially what Rubin describes. Not technical mastery, but decisive clarity about what works and what doesn’t." Loved how you articulated this
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what writers or novelists would be called in the future. I suppose the single word author still applies, though our understanding of it would change. The author becomes the conductor, the director, the idea man. No longer lost in the writing of sentences, but fully alive in the storytelling.
The AI the general public has access to at least can’t write a masterpiece. Not on its own, not with a single prompt and a single click. Unguided it just outputs the AI hive mind conglomerated response of something that sounds good on the face of it, but is bland and, to put it concisely, soulless. AI slop I suppose. Something truly and deeply good still requires human guidance.
I wrote more about this here and I think you might enjoy: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/slop-is-contempt
Good article. I agree with it. The slop already exists. It was never about the tools themselves but how they are used to homogenize and sterilize culture even if unintentionally. Everything becomes a model to follow, a get rich quick scheme. A kind of mimetic cancer.
Why won't AI simply have us do new kinds of work, since it's a new tool at our disposal?
I'm sure it's an argument you've heard before but I'm really genuinely asking.
Computer desk jobs as we know them have only existed for, well, maybe 50 years. Now it's a large majority of white collar work. Did we really think that something that just popped into existence 50 years ago would last unchanged forever?
In my mind it's a new tool, a very disruptive tool that will change how we work, but i dont see how it ends with us in techno utopia.
Whether by the forceful hand of capitalism or by people finding new ways to use AI to create something we cant even think of yet, I dont see this vision.
“i dont see how it ends with us in techno utopia.” I agree with you. Unfortunately, I think it's much more likely that we head towards dystopia. These are three different paths that I charted out based upon my observation of how and why people are using this magnanimous new tool: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/on-awe-and-annihilation-in-the-age
My answer is quite ironic. I love to learn and breakdown complex topics. Possibly the things ai is most used for daily. The more i personally use AI to do any sort of research, the less joy I feel when i produce something. The less i feel i truly understand it, and the less i care about the thing I'm researching. I've even realised this to be true for the seemingly boring data entry work. So i wonder...not only is taste important but does the over use of ai erode our taste buds. This is the crossroads I'm at. Get really good at ai stuff or avoid it almost entirely?
Something I am puzzling on is how my own little interests can be important if the universe is experiencing itself through me. I don't quite understand it, but I accept it, and the understanding will come later.
I started college at 29. Two years of college took me almost four. Then the money ran out. Seventeen years later, I'm still using the evenings to do what I loved before I was partially educated - read, write, explore ideas, and create fun little works that mean something to me.
AI helps break down complex ideas to give me blocks to build with. The ah-ha moments and the connections are up to me. If ideas are the medium, and your mind is the canvas, you have the tools to create. It just takes becoming comfortable with the process. I just passed trip number fifty around the sun, and I feel like I'm just beginning to learn...
I loved this post so much I shared it with my AI-hating kids.
In a world where information and the ability to process it are abundant, the judgement to see what's important and the agency to make it happen will separate the winners from the losers. Reasonable people can disagree on whether that change is bad or good, but either way it's important to accept that it IS and prepare for it.
Excellent article, and a well-timed algorithmic gift seeing as I wrote something echoing many of the same points "off the dome" today!
The struggle that I see for those seeking to cultivate taste and live a "life of passion" is itself partially contained within the Alyssa Liu narrative: Namely, what to do when the passion itself BECOMES a "job", a source of "toil" rather than expression? After all, AI has democratized the access to information and analysis like few other innovations in human history, but it still cannot print sustenance (worth eating) or shelter (that will last longer than a few years).
I suppose, in thinking-while-writing, the answer is something akin to "non-attachment" to things that are more "creature comforts" than true necessities, because I don't foresee the AI executives giving a UBI to those who are attempting to revive taste and expression in the Western world. Still, the only alternative seems to be "taking the long way around" required to create a life where your provision and sustenance is built on your creativity and will, rather than trading your time for income.
Thank you very much for the kind words, Matt. Sometimes the algorithm (that wrathful weapon of math destruction) bestows unexpected gifts in place of the usual insipid fare.
I think your point is well taken and one of my favorite thinkers has a quote that comes to mind: “The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is "in him"; nothing can happen to him. The same may also be said for the contemplative person; he needs himself alone; he lacks nothing.”
―Josef Pieper
Great quote - I'll take this as my sign to move "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" up my list of books that I want to read, as it's been on my radar from some time!
Have a good one!
It is positively stupendous. I'm jealous you'll be reading it for the first time! In case of any interest, this is a collection of the very best books I have ever read. They span genres and topics, but each is worth its weight in gold: https://www.tomwhitenoise.com/bookshelf
Truly awesome list - thanks a ton!
How about ‘Have a good many?’
I actually wrote a whole book about this dizzying experience which you describe above and the second chapter is all about mad men actually! If you care to check it out I can send you details but it touches on many of the themes described here, cultivating self attunement again
Yes, please! I’m re-watching it right now and Freddy just returned to the firm. The writing, the costumes, the philandering, the drinking, the acting is all so very timeless!
This is the 2 minute film short that sets the opening scene for the book and it gives you the book QR code at the end too, if you can’t tell I use a lot of pop culture references in my book 😉: https://youtu.be/0NNAal2LONw
I have way too many things I’m passionate about and love doing — none of them pay my bills.
I’m a born writer but most years I’d starve if that’s all I did.
The deeper shift is not that “the how is gone.” It is that scarcity is moving upstream.
As execution gets cheaper, judgment, taste, and self-authorship become more central and many people will discover they were using work not just for income, but for structure.
I agree. Very soon the Band-Aid is going to be ripped right off as society realizes that most white collar employment was nothing more than adult daycare for the bored masses.
"Desire is one thing that cannot be automated" I recall an objection to utilitarianism; suppose that Cookie Monster loved cookies an octillion times more than a human could love anything. If a society were organized by utilitarian principles to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, they might do the math and conclude: it's better to bake more cookies to feed Cookie Monster than feed these starving humans (or with slightly less-naive utilitarians - feed the humans just enough to avoid repugnance, and channel all their spare resources into cookie factories). It's a weird thing to think "I should use a counterexample to an ethical theory as a role model" but it's getting less weird as I turn it over in my head -- to become a person who can feel euphoric at the smell of petrichor after rainfall or their favorite candle, who can deeply savor a good meal, these are genuine sorts of flourishing. And I suppose there is still value in telling the AI overlords - an Oreo is infinitely worse than cookies made with love (and they can reverse engineer what happened when Grandma would hand-knead the dough, or infer that "love" was code for rum, or...). More immediately, too -- everyone knows what Cookie Monster wants. He is legible. And the skill to render one's soul legible - even in small part, even to oneself - is a rare one.
This is even imore impressive considering he did all this before he had a free digital platform where he could demonstrate what he could do.
Good insight 😃. Can i translate this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?
Yes, I would be honored. Thank you! I just asked that you please link and attribute.
Thanks, and of course !!!