When a new AI model appears, the first thing we ask is: “What can it do?” It crunches code, draws pictures, writes our letters for us. We measure it the way we measure an employee on probation — by the list of tasks it takes off our shoulders.
But notice what happens inside you while you read yet another piece of news about its capabilities. There, beneath the curiosity, another question stirs quietly. Not “what can it do?” but “what will be left of me?”
The first question is technical. Any manual will answer it. The second is existential, and no one will answer it but you. Because it is no longer about what the machine does, but about what it means to be human next to it.
We are used to defining ourselves through what we do: I am the one who calculates, writes, decides. And suddenly it turns out that someone else can do this, faster and without tiring. Then who am I — if not a set of functions?
I think the machine does not take meaning away from us. It hands the question of meaning back to us — the very question we had been hiding from behind our tasks.
And what do you ask first when you see a new model — what it can do, or what it changes in you?