I recently watched an interview in which a documentary producer who films the remote corners of the world talked about the Hadza of Tanzania — said to be the last hunter-gatherer people left on Earth. They don't farm, and they keep no livestock. They hunt, and when the hunt fails, they dig up roots and gather berries. They have no private property, so whatever they catch is shared equally by everyone. Their houses are loosely woven from branches, and when the game moves on, they leave the houses behind without a second thought and move on too.
The producer spent several days living exactly as they did, eating and sleeping alongside them — including sharing the meat of a monkey they had hunted. A single piece of meat that reaches the mouth only at the end of the whole process: chasing, killing, getting blood on your hands, butchering, dividing. Under the video, someone left a comment: "Primitive."
But the producer's answer stayed with me. We don't buy meat at the supermarket because we're civilized, he said — we do it because our jobs are divided. Someone raises the animal, someone slaughters it, someone packages it, and we hand over money and receive it. They simply do all of it themselves, all at once. It isn't a difference between civilization and savagery. It's the difference between splitting the process among strangers and living through all of it yourself.
I'm not saying the division of labor is wrong. It may be one of civilization's greatest achievements — it's what lets each of us go deep on our own work. But the convenience came at a price: we now receive meat with the process of death erased from it. Between people who take their food while living through life and death in full, and people who consume meat with death wiped away, paying money instead — which side truly knows the weight of life? That was the producer's question. I couldn't easily pick an answer.
And lately, this story keeps overlapping with my work.
We live in an era when AI draws our screens, writes our code, and finishes our documents. More and more, we find ourselves seated where results arrive without process — like supermarket meat, with everything that came before erased. I'm no exception. I ask for something, and if I don't like the result, I regenerate it without even reading it. Again and again. Something that once took days of agonizing to make now takes less than a second to throw away. It's convenient, and honestly, I like it. But sometimes I get the feeling of being full without knowing what I ate.
What remains for humans in the AI era? Lately, the English-speaking world keeps answering that question with one word: taste. In Korean we might call it gam — a feel for things — or anmok, an eye for quality. The ability to tell the difference between what looks right and what is right. The ability to sense that something is off before you can explain why. A Hadza hunter can read a track at a glance, they say — how old it is, whether it's worth pursuing. That feel isn't innate. It's what hundreds of failed hunts leave behind in the body. Taste is a byproduct of process, not of results, which is why no amount of received output will produce it. The plausible is now in infinite supply; the eye that separates plausible from good is still made only the old way.
That's why I believe this difference will not go away: between someone who knows even one thing deeply, who has passed through the whole context with their own body, and someone who just receives results and likes them. How that difference gets used varies by organization, of course. And living through every process yourself is as unrealistic as returning to a world before the division of labor. Some seats need depth; others need speed. We've reached a point where you can't even call one side right and the other wrong. Still, one thing seems clear. If you give away the whole process and let go of taste too, the only role left is to receive results and say they look good — and machines already do that faster than we do. Losing your taste isn't when replacement begins. It's when the last thing standing between you and replacement disappears.
There's one more scene that bothers me: a table where we keep ordering even though we're full, and throw away the meat we leave behind.
Because making feels free, we make in bulk — screens that may never be used, documents no one will read, code no one will review. Like the outputs I discarded without reading. The English-speaking world has started calling this flood of output "slop" — the word for pig swill. But it isn't free. Every generation spends tokens; tokens come from data centers, data centers run on electricity, and electricity, in the end, comes from somewhere on this planet. Just as moving the slaughterhouse out of sight erased death from our meat, the data center being out of sight has merely erased the cost of generation. The Hadza hunt only what they need and share everything without waste — not out of superior discipline, I suspect, but because they know in their bodies what a piece of meat costs. No one wastes out of malice. Wherever the price is out of sight, anyone will.
One scene from the producer's account refuses to fade. The Hadza are not a warlike people; disliking fights over land, they kept yielding, and have been pushed further and further from hunting grounds they lived on for thousands of years. Some now make a living performing mock hunts for tourists. And this: while hunting, their eyes blaze as if to say, "I am still alive" — but at rest, having lost their hunting grounds, those same eyes turn sad. It seems that what a person stripped of their process loses isn't just a dulled sense. Perhaps the same thing is quietly happening to us, as we trade away our process one handspan at a time for convenience. Replacement may begin in the eyes long before it arrives as notice.
We can't hunt all our own meat. We don't need to, and I'm not saying we should go back — once civilization comes in, they say, there's no holding it back. But we can choose how we sit at the table: as a hunter, not a receiver. A hunter isn't someone who is handed meat — a hunter is someone who decides for themselves which track to follow. So live through the one thing at the center of your craft from start to finish, and before asking for anything, turn the questions back toward yourself. Can this actually be eaten? What is it that I should be making right now? Is it worth making at all? Producing what we're handed, quickly, is something machines already do better. But deciding what to make, and whether it truly matters, still belongs to us. And that is why I find myself hopeful. Hunting tools have never been this good, which means there has never been a better era for a hunter who knows what to chase. The eyes that say "I am still alive" light up the moment you choose what to hunt.
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