I know artists are feeling the pain of AI intruding on their jobs. And it’s easy for non-artists to say, “Welp, too late, you’ll have to do something else.” There is some part of that that is true – the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back in again. To some degree, it’s a tool, and artists who learn to wield the tool will have a future, and the ones who don’t will have to do something else.

But if you’re looking at AI art and thinking, “Well, *my* job is secure, no AI is going to have the judgment I do”… think back to this moment and whether you extended empathy to the folks who see their jobs at risk or not, because that is where you’ll be at some point.

Engineers, game designers, producers, CEOs, COOs, CPOs, whatever. AI’s coming for all of our jobs. There will be huge portions of our work that can be outsourced to data-hungry pattern-matching tools, because much of the work of *every* job is pattern-matching. There’s a good case to be made that for most judgment calls, AI will be *better* at it than any individual human.

And honestly, for those things, I’d rather have the robots take it over IF AND ONLY IF what it means is that we decouple “living” from “work”.

I’m fine with robots taking over the tasks of most jobs, but what we need to do then is not mandate that every human has to carve out a *job* while competing with AI to “earn a living”. At this point, if AI can do it faster (maybe even better), then that’s awesome. But then we can’t expect people to compete. We can’t expect people to have to “earn a living” as though they need to justify their lives and existence through commercial enterprise.

If we understand that for a lot of jobs – maybe even the majority of jobs – and lots of shitty, repetitive, bullshit jobs – are going AI’s way, then it behooves us to think about our lives not in the context of our work and how it “earns us a living”. We can think of our work as how we help others, how we interact with society, and how we make the world a better place for each other.

Yeah, it’s idealistic bullshit. But the alternative is a nightmare dystopia. Our professional lives are so enmeshed in this weird Protestant work-ethic capitalism that it’s sometimes hard to even think in a different mindset where work isn’t the driving force of your worth or morals or life. But take a sec and give it a shot. What do *you* see?