Widespread despair among the young over AI: Just get to press Enter, instead of getting the chance to use their brains themselves. By Gregory Conti.

Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:

“It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I’ll never get to do it.

The people in their fifties and sixties, they’re lucky. I’m even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that’s still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.

It’s very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won’t get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that’s actually heartbreaking.

It’s heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two’s time.

It’s like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don’t need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown.”

Looking on the Bright Side. By Kris Cvetko:

The value of a human being is so much greater than the ability to fill out Excel sheets, sit through Teams calls, and waste their potential in a corporate job.

I hear the concern loud and clear. People are afraid of losing their source of income. And understandably so, especially when that income depends on activities that have become mind-numbing corporate routines.

Should AI replace those activities? Absolutely. And rightfully so. …

AI is a mirror. And the fact that some work can be replaced by a statistical token prediction model says a lot more about the nature of that work than about the humans doing it. …

What might happen (if Allah wishes):

I’m talking about an economy where more of us become entrepreneurs, creators, and builders. Where individuals have access to capabilities and means of production that were completely out of reach for most of us just five years ago.

Our kids hate AI.

But we cannot put the genie back in the bottle — there are too many bottles and too many genies, i.e. someone else will use AI if we don’t.