The Machine in Me
A friend quietly admitted something a bit strange: she’s started pretending to use AI at work. She’ll drop lines like “I’ll have GPT take a pass at it” or “Claude flagged this as risky,” then go do the work herself. Nobody’s questioned it. Just nods, “okays,” confirmations.
But for her, it’s not about productivity. It’s about staying visible, staying useful and relevant, being human in a workplace that increasingly speaks in machine—even when only humans are listening.
I get it.
Because there’s a machine in me too. Not silicon or code, but something subtler. A twitch. A reflex to not just optimize but automate myself; each thought, meeting, draft—before I’ve even asked if it matters.
Some days, I feel like I’m trying to feed ideas into a parser instead of slow cooking them into something they can’t be on their own based strictly on logical responses to the string that precedes them. It’s not just that I’m using a machine. It’s that sometimes, I catch myself trying to become one:
“Draft a compelling rationale.”
“Flag for escalation.”
“Summarize in bullet points.”
Last week my friend back-channeled me during a Teams call and asked—half-joking, half-daring—“So when are they replacing all of us with GPT?” I laughed. She didn’t.
And I get that too.
That question, the nervous joke about AI coming for your job, is the new topic in ‘Big Talk’ (as opposed to small talk). It’s how we test the collective emotional waterline. And it seems most of us are finding the line disturbingly high. You can hear it behind the questions people ask about ChatGPT or Claude or Veo—too many tools to keep straight—and even more clearly in the questions they don’t ask:
Am I replaceable?
Is this the end of my role?
If a machine can do it faster, is it even worth doing at all?
These are legitimate and human questions. And they deserve better answers than “don’t worry, tech always creates more jobs than it destroys” or “AI will augment not replace.” Because that’s getting harder and harder to believe.
Almost every week, there’s another headline promising to replace creativity with computation. That recent one from Headai.io? Yet another startup claiming it can automate strategy, hiring, even decision-making. The hype screams: future of human endeavor is being outsourced in real-time.
And then there are the headlines that don’t need hype. Recently, Microsoft announced it was laying off approximately 6,000 to 7,000 employees—about 3% of its global workforce. In Washington state alone, nearly 2,000 people were let go. Over 40% were software developers and engineers. Not junior staff. Not warehouse jobs. Developers. Builders. Some with decades of experience.
The timing didn’t go unnoticed. Just days earlier, Satya Nadella had proudly shared that AI now writes 30% of Microsoft’s code. The company says the layoffs were about reducing management layers—not replacing humans with machines. But if you’re a developer who just got cut while your CEO praises AI’s productivity, it probably doesn’t feel like a coincidence.
Still—context matters.
That Headai headline? It was mostly clickbait. As John Battelle pointed out in his piece “Bad Head,” the article was written for panic, not perspective. Battelle dismantles the premise with clarity: these stories are less about technology and more about attention. But even if the narrative is flawed, the emotional weight is real. Even when we know better, we still feel the pressure. Because the machine in us—this internalized urge to optimize or justify our work—keeps humming.
So, does technology always create more jobs than it destroys?
Historically? Yes. From the cotton gin to the steam engine to the internet, new technologies have upended labor markets. But each time, new sectors emerged. New roles. New applications, new work, better work.
The mechanization of agriculture put millions of farmhands out of work, but sparked waves of industrial and logistical growth.
The rise of computers made typists and switchboard operators obsolete—but gave rise to developers, designers, system architects, and digital marketers.
Why does this keep happening? Because technology doesn’t create jobs. People do. Technology shifts the tools. But the desire to solve problems, invent things, tell stories, and create meaning? That comes from us.
And here's the part that gets lost; many of the jobs AI will help create don’t even have names yet:
In 1995, nobody was hiring SEO strategists or mobile app developers.
In 2005, there were no jobs for cloud architects or YouTube creators.
Even product managers—now a cornerstone role in tech—barely existed as a discipline two decades ago.
Every leap forward creates new demands. New possibilities. And possibility is still a profoundly human space.
The brush doesn’t paint the picture. This is where we go wrong: We imagine AI as the artist. The author. The decision-maker. But AI isn’t the painter. It’s the brush. It’s the keyboard. The lens. The drafting tool. It’s something a human picks up and uses to express intent. To shape an experience. To make something new.
Yes, it can paint without us. But the question isn’t can it? It’s why would it matter if it did? The things that matter—stories, brands, experiences, tools, teams—are reflections of human values. Of our contradictions, our curiosity, our taste. A machine can remix what already exists. But only a person can say, “This is what should exist next.”
What happens to creative work?
This question is no longer abstract. It’s showing up in every field, every meeting, every roadmap. Understand, “creative” work isn’t limited to artists and designers.
It includes:
Writers
Coders
Product managers
Strategists
Even the weirdos who draw boxes on whiteboards and call them journeys
AI will absolutely change how we work:
Designers will generate a hundred visual directions in minutes.
Writers will co-edit in real time with large language models.
Engineers will scaffold logic and test outcomes by lunch.
PMs will synthesize discovery, validate assumptions, and model platforms with a precision we never had before.
But it still won’t tell us why we’re doing it. It won’t ask if this is the right problem. It won’t feel the difference between something that simply works and something that matters. That’s still us.
The future of work. I used to think the biggest risk was job loss. Now I think it’s something quieter. It’s meaning loss. Motivation loss. It’s people believing the tools have taken the soul out of the work.
But maybe the machine in me is accretive. I have the steam engine in me. The transistor. The microchip. The Internet. And now, slowly—AI is entering too. What it is. How to use it. What it means. And how to think with it without becoming it. How to let it in, like we let in all the others, while still becoming, as we do, more and more human.
Maybe my friend is doing the same. Trying to stay supremely, essentially human while allowing the technology to enter, to accrete, to alloy.
Fulfilling, maybe, the oldest promise of all: To become what we’re meant to be. The future doesn’t belong to the machine. It belongs to the one holding the brush.