What's left when the doing gets cheap

I got into a conversation the other day about why people do anything, and someone floated the idea that it mostly comes down to two things — solving a problem, or feeling something. Problem-solving and emotional fulfillment. It’s a clean split and it holds up for a lot of cases, even if you can poke at it (plenty of what we do is just habit, or momentum, or some sense of who we are that doesn’t fit neatly in either box).

But the binary itself wasn’t the interesting part to me. What was interesting was what AI does to it. Because for a long time the two were tangled together — solving the problem was the satisfying part. You wrote the thing, fixed the thing, figured the thing out, and the doing and the feeling came as one.

AI is quietly pulling those apart. The functional layer — the “can this actually get done” part — is getting cheap and abundant, and when something gets cheap it stops being where the value lives. So if solving the problem is no longer the scarce thing, the question becomes what is, and I keep landing on this word “authorship,” even though I’m not sure it’s the right one.

What I mean is the part where the thing is yours. Not whether it got done, but whether you were the one who decided it was worth doing, whose judgment is sitting underneath it, whose fingerprint is on it. And the thing I keep getting stuck on is that I used to think authorship was something you stamped on at the end — you make the thing and then it’s yours. But I don’t think that’s how it works. I think it happens while you’re making it, or it doesn’t happen at all.

I notice this most with writing, because writing is where I catch myself thinking I have an idea when I actually don’t. It feels clear in my head, and then I sit down to write it and realize it was mush, and the writing is the thing that turns it from mush into something real. If I skip that — if I hand it off before it’s been dragged through actual sentences — the result might even come out cleaner, but there’s nothing of mine in it, because the part where it would have become mine is the part I skipped.

Someone described this to me as the difference between being a source and being a relay, and that stuck. A relay just passes something through. A source sat with it long enough that it actually clicked for them first. AI makes being a relay almost frictionless, and I think that’s the whole tension — the easier it gets to relay, the more the only thing worth anything is having actually been a source.

The chess thing is what makes me believe this isn’t just nostalgia. Engines beat humans decades ago and chess got more popular, not less. Nobody sits down to play because they think they’ll out-calculate a machine. They play for the game itself. The functional ceiling moved to the computer and people just kept the part that was never really about function in the first place.

So maybe that’s where a lot of this is going. The grind gets handed off, and what people choose to keep doing won’t be the stuff they’re capable of doing — it’ll be the stuff they want to have done themselves. Which is a stranger motivation than it sounds, and I don’t think we’ve really priced it in yet.

Anyway, still turning this over. Curious whether anyone else feels the same pull.