AI Took the Parts of the Job We Loved
They promised it would take the drudgery. It took the joy and left the drudgery. So it goes.
They told us the machines would take the boring work. This was the promise. The robots would handle the drudgery, and we would be freed for the good stuff. The creative stuff. The human stuff. Everyone nodded. It sounded wonderful. It did not happen that way. It rarely does.
What actually happened
The machine looked at your job and took the parts it found easy. And the parts it found easy turned out to be the parts you loved. The writing. The drawing. The solving. The small daily acts that made you feel like yourself.
What it left behind was the rest. The checking. The fixing. The approving. The meetings about the thing the machine made. You became the supervisor of your own former joy. So it goes.
It is faster now. Everyone agrees it is faster. Nobody is quite sure it is better, and nobody has time to ask.
The writing. The drawing. The solving. The small daily acts of making that quietly felt like you.
The checking. The fixing. The approving. The meetings about the thing the machine made.
There is a particular sadness in watching a tool do, in four seconds, the thing that used to take you all afternoon, and that you secretly looked forward to all morning. It feels ungrateful to complain about a miracle. So we keep quiet and approve another draft we did not write.
And yet
The people who are doing all right have figured out something quietly important. The machine can take the task. It cannot take the craft. It can write the sentence. It cannot want to.
The wanting, the caring, the stubborn human insistence that this could be a little better, that is still yours. If you decide to keep it.
So keep it. Guard the part you love. Do not hand the machine the one thing that was the entire point. Let it have the drudgery it was promised, and take back the joy it wandered off with while no one was looking.
"Come on, this is just nostalgia"
It is a fair hit, and I will take it honestly. Every generation mourns the craft the next one automates. The monks who spent their lives lettering manuscripts surely loved the work the printing press erased, and the world did not end. We adapted. We always adapt. If this essay is just one more person romanticizing a chore that deserved to die, it should be ignored.
But look at what the printing press actually took. It took the copying, the mechanical reproduction, the part nobody became a monk to do. It left the writing, the deciding, the meaning. What is happening now runs the other way. We are handing the machine the deciding and the composing, the part people actually trained for, and keeping the proofreading. This is not nostalgia for drudgery. It is an alarm about which half we are giving up. Mourn the lettering all you want. Just do not let anyone talk you out of the sentence.
Where this lands
The work was never the enemy. Forgetting why you liked it is. So it goes, but only if you let it.
I write about AI, data, and learning regularly at pinaldave.com, and I have been teaching this hands-on in my AI workshops.