Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
I was sitting at my desk watching OpenAI live stream Right before Halloween, it approaches the 58-minute mark of a not-so-spectacular 62-minute broadcast. I’ll admit I wasn’t a great caller by this point. Let’s wrap it up guys, I’m ready for lunch!
Jacob Paczucki, chief scientist at OpenAI, had just finished talking about the role of AI in causing massive layoffs when CEO Sam Altman suddenly turned to him and asked: “What do you think meaning will look like? What do you think the jobs of the future will look like? How do you think that when AI automates a lot of current things, how do you think we will derive satisfaction and spend our time?”
The question shocked me. I didn’t expect a billionaire CEO to think about such a question. And you got my full attention.
What do you think the meaning would look like?
Pachoki paused for a long moment, then gave a thoughtful answer about the ability to understand more about the world and the amazing diversity of knowledge that can be accessed as artificial intelligence advances.
The live broadcast has concluded. My work day continued.
But I couldn’t let it go. The question still haunts me – sitting at traffic lights in my car, walking my dog, thinking about it in the moments before sleep. I corner my friends to ask them what they think about purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.
What will meaning look like in the age of artificial intelligence?
Don’t miss any of our unbiased technical content and lab reviews. Add CNET As Google’s preferred source.
Meaning beyond AI automation
I’ve thought about this at length. So here’s my answer, Sam.
Meaning and purpose are rooted in the things we personally value and invest our energy in. We’ll find it in things that AI can’t automate, but we’ll also find it in… Still doing those things Although artificial intelligence.
Automation does not necessarily reduce the value of doing something manually. We have mechanized handcrafts for centuries, yet people still knit blankets, roll dough by hand, spread oils on canvas, and write letters by hand because doing so is so satisfying. No fulfillment was found in the output. I found it in our post.
With AI seeping into every nook and corner of our lives, I am more influenced by process and craftsmanship than ever before. At a time when so much of online culture seems designed to rot the brain, I find myself watching anime because the artistry in it is amazing, taking pottery classes just to work with my hands, and reading interviews with film sound designers because I’m fascinated by how they hear the world and translate it into cinema. These are all things that machines can imitate, and perhaps execute flawlessly, but what I find meaningful is the fact that I am part of the process. I am putting in the time, effort, curiosity, and trying.
The meaning is not limited to what AI cannot do. It’s what we choose to do anyway. Not because the technology is not advanced enough, but because it is not human. There is something about witnessing human skill, human interest, and human care that seems more valuable now than ever before. This is not nostalgia. It’s just a confession.
Value in analog and shared experiences
When ChatGPT can publish articles in seconds, Sora can conjure up real-life videos, NotebookLM can highlight links across entire libraries, and generative chatbots like Claude, Gemini, and Grok take on more and more of the cognitive and creative work, the tangible and imperfect feels new to me. I’m relearning how much I need analog experiences.
Last month, at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, I was blown away by a 30-plus minute glassblowing demonstration. The artist worked with molten glass at temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees, shaping it with breath, tools, and decades of embodied knowledge. I’ve watched him compensate for flaws with charm and ingenuity, turning what could have been flaws into intentional design elements. The crowd around me was completely silent, mesmerized. We weren’t just watching something being made. We were watching a human being negotiate physics, chance, and his limits in real time. No artificial intelligence can replicate those specific negotiations, those specific waltzes of materiality and risk. The point wasn’t that AI can’t blow glass, it was that we could all be present and share the experience.
The scarcity of analog devices will also become more valuable, as digital technology spreads toward infinity. While I was writing this review, I received a letter in the mail from my best friend, Sydney. The sight of her handwriting—as familiar to me as my own, with its distinctive slant and the way she pronounces the letter “Y”—brought me to tears. That handwriting contains it. Her hand moved across that paper. You thought of me while forming those letters. The AI could perfectly formulate her text, but it couldn’t fake the fact that she was there, pen in hand, thinking about me.
AI chatbots can do a lot of your “thinking” and excel at performing your work tasks, so let’s all embrace hands-on activities and skills where the body is the central focus. I wouldn’t be surprised to see martial arts, boxing, yoga, climbing, hiking, and dancing become more popular as powerful antidotes to AI oversaturation.
Remember that the brain is a physical reality as well. Even a sedentary writer who fiddles with diction and syntax will find meaning as he tries, selects, deletes, and shapes. An AI model can craft prose or create a video of someone dancing or boxing, but it can’t generate muscle memory, the way a dancer interprets the music at that specific, unrepeated moment, or how a writer wrestles with a sentence until he says what he wants. This is reserved for us humans.
Human parts
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Meaning will only come from what moves us. Subterfuge will never be what moves us. Not really, not in the ways that matter.
Purpose, identity, meaning, redemption, and so much more that is important, are all linked to chaos, inefficiency, frustration, and misunderstanding. These are not just hallmarks of humanity, as errors, anomalies and failures appear in the outputs of generative AI as well. But for us humans, these mistakes have real risks. At stake is our effort, our vanity, our hope…a lifetime as we learn, grow, grow old, get tired, need rest, and do so in such a limited amount of time. When we make mistakes, we try again, and it is this process that changes us and provides us value.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence. It’s something I discovered while watching the movie The Smashing Machine, when Emily Blunt’s character breaks a beautiful blue bowl into many delicate pieces. Later in the film, she gifts a ceramic bowl that has been repaired with gold, and explains the art of kintsugi, a technique rooted in wabi-sabi that uses gold, silver, or platinum powder-coated paint to repair broken pottery. The result is often asymmetrical and imperfections are evident – evidence that it was made by human hands, and subject to human errors and limitations.
We are impressed by evidence of another consciousness such as our own. By proving that someone else was here, paying attention, making choices, and leaving traces. By knowing that something costs effort, risk, or time – the same things that AI makes frictionless. In a world where AI can generate “enhanced” images, “enhanced” prose, and “enhanced” art, imperfection becomes much more valuable. The sign of the human hand will become a signature of meaning itself.
Sam, in the age of AI, meaning will look like everything AI is designed to eliminate. Slowness. Inefficiency. Lack. Danger. Human parts. The embodied human experiences we continue to have are not because of us He owns But because doing them changes us in so many wondrous ways.