The Expiring Skill
Every generation of tools gets easier until the tool itself disappears. Command lines gave way to GUIs, GUIs to touch, touch to voice. Right now, knowing how to configure a specific AI setup matters: it's a real edge, and I'm catching up with it myself. But I see it as a step along the way. Not the destination.
Your intent, however, is something that doesn't expire. The drive to solve the thing that keeps you up at night. The urge to fix what's broken in your corner of the world. That has never become obsolete, and it won't start now.
The Closing Gap
Every major technology shift has followed the same arc: the tool disappears into the background. Command lines required memorizing syntax. GUIs replaced that with pointing and clicking. Touch screens removed even the pointer. Voice removed the screen. Each step made the tool more invisible, and shifted the question from "can you operate this?" to "what do you want to do?"
AI follows this trajectory: The gap between having an idea and executing is closing very rapidly.
This is exciting and uncomfortable at the same time. If the tool disappears, then the people whose value was tied to operating the tool face a real problem. That's not abstract but people's livelihoods. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Still the direction is clear, and understanding it is better than ignoring it.
Agency Doesn't Become Obsolete
Skills are what you can do. Agency is what you want to do. They're different things, and they age differently.
When a factory worker's manual skill was automated, the loss was devastating, not just economically, but also personally. Years of expertise rendered irrelevant overnight. But the desire to build, to create something useful, to provide for a family, that didn't go away.
This new technology is somehow similar. However, AI doesn't just automate execution. It also opens execution to anyone with intent. A person who knows what needs to happen but doesn't know how to code, design, analyze, or build can now get much further than before. The tool meets you where you are.
I'm not naive about this and the transition hurts. The gap between losing a skill-based job and channeling your agency through new tools is a real gap, with real bills. I don't have a neat answer for that. But I do think recognizing that agency survives, even when skills don't, matters for how we think about what comes next.
Jevons' Paradox of Human Purpose
In the 1860s, economist William Stanley Jevons observed something counterintuitive: as coal engines became more efficient, coal consumption didn't drop but rather exploded. More efficiency meant more uses. More uses meant more demand. This became known as Jevons' paradox. And the term has been widely cited lately in relation to technology and AI.
The same logic applies to problem-solving. As AI makes it more efficient to address challenges, we won't run out of problems. We'll find more problems worth solving. Problems we couldn't even see before because we didn't have the capacity to address them. Problems that were too small-scale, too niche, too local, too complex for any individual or underfunded team.
The more capable the tools, the more human intent has places to go. Not fewer.
What This Looks Like in Practice
What kind of challenges could real people with intent and powerful AI tools actually tackle?
A retired urban planner who has always noticed that her city's bus routes haven't changed since 1987, while the city has transformed completely. She uses AI to analyze actual movement patterns, population shifts, and accessibility gaps, then publishes an open proposal that anyone can build on. Reshaping how a city moves, starting from one person's observation.
This wouldn't guarantee income and wouldn't mean a job by any means. Yet it would be valuable. And achieving the same would have been unfeasible with previously available tools.
The Honest Gap
Let me name the tension directly: pursuing your intent doesn't pay the bills. At least not automatically, not yet.
I'm not going to pretend that new economic models will magically appear to reward every act of agency. The gap between "creating genuine value" and "earning a living" is real, and I don't have a clean answer for closing it.
But I've noticed something. When people create genuine value, other people notice and care. They may even engage. Value has a way of finding its way back, even if the path isn't clear yet.
Finding Each Other
Something else is changing alongside the tools: the ability to find each other. People with aligned intent (who care about the same creek, the same language, the same gap in the system) can now connect more easily than ever.
Small groups, organized around a shared challenge, armed with AI tools that amplify their collective agency. Just people who noticed the same problem and decided to do something about it.
This isn't a replacement for jobs but rather a parallel force. While the employment landscape evolves (and yes, the uncertainty is real and alarming), this other reality of people solving problems together could unfold alongside it. Not utopia. Maybe something more modest: small groups creating tangible outcomes. Harmony over disruption. Sustainability over speed. Positive outcomes while minimizing negatives.
What's Sitting in Your Peripheral Vision?
Think about the problem that's been sitting in your peripheral vision. The one you've noticed for years but couldn't do anything about. The broken process, the unmet need, the gap nobody's filling. Now ask: what if you could?
Not "what if someone could." What if you could. With intent, with tools that are more accessible every day, with the ability to find others who see the same problem.
The skill that gets you there might change. The tool might change. But the drive to get there, your intent, that's yours and it doesn't expire.
Call to action
If you want a starting point, try pasting this into any AI assistant:
I've been noticing a problem that matters to me: [describe it here]. Help me understand the problem space. Who's affected? What's been tried before? What would "better" look like? Don't try to solve it yet. Just help me map it clearly.
Originally published at turtleand.com
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