The same people that say they hate their jobs are the ones most frantic about AI taking them.
The easy read is hypocrisy, but I don't think that's what's actually going on. What people actually want is the paycheck without the suffering, and they've always wanted that. The job was never the point; the life the paycheck enabled was the point. We've blurred the two for so long that wanting one without the other feels almost taboo to say out loud.
Buddhism's first truth is that life is suffering, not as pessimism but as observation. For a lot of people, work is where they meet it most often. It's the meeting they didn't want to take, the email that comes in at 11pm, the project they don't believe in, the slow drain of doing something every day that doesn't feel aligned with their dreams. Work isn't the only source of suffering, but for most people I know it's the most concentrated dose of it.
AI is starting to remove that. Not all of it, and not at once, but more of it every month. I've been building with these tools every day for the last year, and the capability curve in the last few months is something you can only really feel if you're in it. Most people aren't in it yet. They're working from a 2023 mental model of a chatbot that hallucinates, and that model is already wrong and getting more wrong by the day.
The people who have seen it are often scared to accept what it means, because accepting it requires rebuilding your identity around something other than your job. That's psychologically expensive, so it's easier to panic. It's easier to say AI is overhyped, or that it'll never replace what I do, or that the people excited about it are naive. Those are defenses, not arguments.
The optimistic version is actually very simple. Humans get to be humans. All of the small frictions that fill a day, the groceries you have to remember to order, the emails that need a response, the deck you have to pull together by Friday, the calendar you have to keep on top of, all of it gets quietly handled in the background. You still do your job, but the parts of it that drain you stop draining you. You trust that the groceries will arrive at your door by a small robotic vehicle while you're out on a run. You trust that the email got the right reply.
The hours that used to go to the mundane and the repetitive go somewhere else. They go to the garden. They go to building things you actually want to build. They go to dinner with a friend you've been meaning to see. They go to your kids, your partner, the books you keep saying you want to read. AI isn't taking life away from people. It's giving us back the time to live the lives we always felt we were meant to live. I genuinely believe that.
Over the last few months, I've watched the world of technology advance in a way I could've never anticipated. We are in a transformational moment. I've never been more optimistic about what this technology can do for humanity.