Thought I'm Wrestling With: What Happens to Human Worth in the Age of Automation?

Why polished output can feel emptier than ever.

As anyone remotely in touch with the times knows, AI is the buzzword. It’s the answer to every problem, and the solution to every problem that doesn’t even exist yet.

Every CEO is giving a pep talk to middle management about how AI is going to change their company for the better. And that everyone must get smart with AI.

AI is the future.

Yes, AI is great.

But lately I’ve been scratching my head over the net benefit it’s bringing to us. This isn’t an anti-AI rant. It’s a question about what gets lost when machines handle more of our expression. If output goes up, does human worth go down, or just get harder to see?

As more and more people use AI, more and more content and output will be AI generated.

For example, everyone says, I save so much time now that I don’t have to draft these emails. I have AI write them for me.

Well now most emails are produced from an AI assistant of some sort, which in a weird way makes them less scary. Once I accepted that most of my inbox was produced by some bot or LLM, the angst around sending and receiving professional emails dissipated. Gen Z might not remember a time when you spent an hour writing an email that ended up being three sentences long because you wanted it to be perfect, but those days existed.

It needed to carry the right tone, but get the message across strongly. Be warm, yet professional. Informative but not dry.

And when I received an email, I knew someone put time and energy into crafting it. When the notification hit that your manager just sent you an email, a butterfly emerged in your stomach wondering how you might have screwed something up or what extra work you just got nominated to do. And you read it in their voice.

Side note: I also have the thought often about how ridiculous email really is. Sure it’s a way to communicate. But humanity has become enslaved to the technology in a way that practically doesn’t make any sense. No one wants to read emails. No one wants to write emails. No one wants to receive an email. Why the fuck do we still use email then?

This phenomenon isn’t just for emails.

Job applications. College essays. Brainstorming ideas. Data analysis. They are all being outsourced to some AI platform or tool.

I get it. Life is finite and time is precious. Not many of us think that editing a Word document for the tenth job application is a great use of that time. I agree.

But as we outsource our lives to AI, we slowly lose our individuality.

Without getting too technical, these AI systems are trained on overlapping data at massive scale. The essence of the technology requires access to a lot of information in order to work as intended.

A data scientist on a podcast I listened to recently pointed out that many large language models draw from broadly similar corpora. Whether you use Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini, the diets are highly overlapping. The paradox is this. The better an AI system is, the more data it needs. But the world’s high-quality data is finite. As AI systems grow, their training sets inevitably overlap more and more.

So the output of these models tends to converge.

If every college applicant uses them to write their essays, how are they going to stand out? Sure, each person has a unique story and inputs. But the expression starts to blur together. Polished. Competent. Interchangeable.

The individuality that used to come from the writer’s mind now gets routed through near-identical black boxes.

When someone uses AI, it doesn’t impress you. You don’t think less of them, but there’s a subtle disappointment that they didn’t really do it.

A few months ago I read a newsletter by Oliver Burkeman that named a hidden truth I only felt before.

“The point of a good novel produced by a human isn’t that only a human could have produced it. It’s that a human did. There really was another thinking, emoting consciousness at the other end of the line. When you consume the work, you enter into a kind of relationship with them.”

That is why we appreciate content, work, art, and writing. We connect with the author. We acknowledge the work they did to produce it, the talent on display, and the distinct insights they bring to light.

The perfect sentence structure or grammar isn’t what moves us forward as a species. It’s the effort to reach it. The trying. That often matters more than the output itself.

Let’s say you hear a song on the radio. You’re jamming out. It directly captures the emotions you’re feeling in that moment.

Now, what if you found out it was generated by AI from a journal entry you wrote that morning. It took your thoughts and feelings, plugged them into its musical model, and curated a song for you to listen to three seconds later.

For me, that brings an air of disappointment. You are underwhelmed precisely because it was artificially generated. The technical competence is there. The connection is not.

This is not to say all AI content is bad, unnecessary, or redundant. It is to shed light on our true desires as humans. We want to connect, not just consume.

Don’t believe me? Public speaking is often cited as a top fear. We don’t want to be ostracized from the group. We want to fit in. We want to belong to other people.

Because of that desire for connectedness, I now find myself second-guessing whether the content, email, video, music, or artwork in front of me is human made or AI generated. It’s sad, but these days my initial inclination is that something creative in nature is AI produced. Or at least refined by AI.

And it’s bittersweet. You want to appreciate the thought or message that inspired the piece of content. But without the human effort and touch, it falls below expectations.

The irony is that while AI tools have raised the standard of output, they have diminished the impact it has.

As a result, AI is shifting what the market values. Diligence and first-draft polish get automated. Scarcer now are taste, judgment, curation, courage, lived experience, and trust.

We used to have copywriters who were experts of language at work. They could massage words and communications better than most people, and that was their profession. Now much of that quality is a prompt away and the cost is saved.

This concept is nothing new. AI is replacing a multitude of tasks because it can perform them better, quicker, and cheaper.

But there is another impact we don’t often name. It changes the comparative advantage of distinct qualities within professions.

Here is a fictitious scenario.

Say you have Lawyer A. Hard working, studious, attentive. Not particularly charismatic, but they never leave a page unread and come to meetings prepared.

Compare them with Lawyer B. Political, great with words. They tell a wonderful story and have that charm that swings a jury. They are not particularly studious, but they shine at big moments.

Who benefits more from the introduction of AI?

If AI can review documents and spit out key findings, Lawyer A loses their edge. Preparation is leveled. Performance is amplified. Maybe that’s fair. But a lot of us still feel like Lawyer A got the short end of the stick.

I am not here to say good or bad. I am saying the introduction of AI has dramatic impacts across industries and professions, even when workers are not directly replaced. It reshuffles which human traits carry weight.

One last thing I am still wrestling with. AI does not improve pure human productivity. It increases total output.

AI multiplies artifacts. It does not multiply attention. So we flood the zone with more emails, more decks, more videos, more everything, while the human capacity to notice and care stays fixed.

Is that good or bad?

Have we just cluttered the world even more at a time when we are already drowning in abundance?

What does humanity gain from the explosion of AI output?

I fear it is not as great as we expect. And I worry about unseen externalities and trade offs if we keep inflating the AI bubble before we slow down and understand our relationship to it as a species.

This is not me claiming that Terminator is coming to town instead of Santa this Christmas. I am asking what truly matters to us.

What do we gain from saving a few minutes typing an email if we lose the connection to the individual on the other end. A name. A voice. A person.

I can see an AI inflation landscape brewing where there is a continuous injection of AI produced content that distracts us, distorts truth, and distances us from one another.

Maybe the real danger isn’t AI becoming more human. It’s us becoming less.