If you make things with your hands or care for people for a living, you may be wondering whether anyone will still pay for that once a machine can produce something close in seconds. I don't think the answer is simple, and I won't soothe you with a slogan.
Start with where the technology is today. Stanford's 2026 AI Index described AI performance as jagged. It reported that top systems succeeded on roughly two thirds of tasks in the OSWorld computer-use benchmark. That's impressive, and a long way from doing everything. Still, my view is that over the long run AI may do much more of today's work, so this question is worth asking before it's urgent.
Imagine a future neighborhood baker who makes birthday cakes to order. In this hypothetical, an automated competitor offers a similar cake at half the price. Some families will keep ordering from the baker because they know them, or because the baker remembers that their kid hates frosting. Others will want a person to have made it, full stop. Many will take the cheaper cake. None of those choices is wrong.
A skeptic would say this is a comfortable story for a small group. Handmade goods have long been a premium niche. If most buyers take the cheaper cake, a preference for the human touch funds some bakers, not a whole workforce. I think that's right. A taste for handmade things is real, but it is not an economic plan for everyone.
Where I'd push back is on the idea that a cheaper substitute settles what we should value. A handmade cake can matter because someone chose to spend their time making it. That doesn't make every handmade cake better, or oblige anyone to buy one. It means the process and the relationship can be part of what people want, alongside the finished thing.
Then there's meaning that may never show up on a balance sheet: a song played at a friend's memorial, or a meal cooked for a neighbor just home from the hospital. A machine could produce something similar, but it wouldn't be the same gift.
Here's an exercise worth five minutes. Write down one thing you'd still want a person to do for you even if a machine did it for free, then ask yourself why. If the answer is trust or presence, that's a clue about where human work keeps its meaning. If it's mostly habit, that's worth knowing too. And keep the other question in view: how people pay their bills is a separate problem, and meaning alone won't solve it.
AI-assisted editing. Published with Rob Price's approval.