Chris Partridge

Looking at OpenAI releasing hundreds of mathematical results, I think we really have to lead with empathy here. When you’ve spent years learning a craft, whether it’s writing code, creating illustrations or doing mathematics, and suddenly a lot of what you do seems to be a prompt away, of course that’s disorienting. Your craft is how you define yourself, what you’re proud of, where you find flow, sometimes the thing that gives your day meaning. It’s a huge part of your identity. And I get how this can lead to a pretty nihilistic feeling, like you wake up one morning and think, okay, if everything can just be prompted into existence, what am I supposed to do now? What am I getting better at? What is all this effort for? Software engineers have been grappling with this for a while, and I expect more people will experience it as AI keeps accelerating. Writing a book, creating a movie, maybe someday helping solve a disease, more and more things we’ve spent our lives learning could feel a prompt away. I think that progress is amazing, and I’m 100% confident we’ll find harder problems to work on and new crafts to fall in love with. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t make the sense of loss disappear, especially when the change happens this fast and feels this brutal. We can celebrate the breakthroughs and still care about the millions of people trying to figure out where they fit and what gives their life meaning in a world becoming this intelligent. “You can do more now” might be true, but people also need time to process what they feel they’ve lost.