We're living through a special time.
Right now, today, you can accomplish more as a single person with less time and less money than entire companies could in the past.
You can learn any skill faster than anyone before you. You can find the knowledge you need to do almost anything. You don't need a degree. You don't need a certification. You don't need permission. There has never been a better time to start a business. There has never been a better time to have a problem.
Most people hear "AI" and think about job loss, or robots, or some vague future that doesn't concern them yet. But what's actually happening is more interesting and more human than any of that.
Machines are for speed, repetition, and necessity. Humans are for story, novelty, myth, and meaning. AI solves utility so humans can transcend to meaning. I'm optimistic for a future where all the boring, repetitive tasks are handled, and humans can work purely on what's creative, strategic, and fulfilling.
This isn't as radical as it sounds. It's actually a return to something older.
What We Call "Normal" Is Actually New
What we call "normal work" is actually a recent invention.
Go back two hundred years and employment barely existed. In the early American economy, roughly 80% of free workers were self-employed. Farmers, blacksmiths, cobblers, carpenters. They woke when they wanted, decided what to make, sold what they created, and lived with the consequences. This was work as Jefferson imagined it: the independent individual, beholden to no one. Then came the factories.
The Industrial Revolution didn't just change how things were made. It changed what it meant to work. Millions moved into massive organizations built on one principle: break complex work into tiny, repeatable steps anyone could perform. A craftsman who once built an entire chair now attached one leg, over and over, for 8 hours.
The skill was extracted from the worker and embedded into the system. Workers were deliberately kept ignorant of the full process so they couldn't leave and compete. Bells dictated when work started and stopped. Supervisors watched constantly. Workers no longer sold products. They sold hours, and they owned nothing they made.
This created the modern employee and what Marx called alienation: disconnection from the product, the process, and their own potential. Work stopped being about creation and became about survival. The 9-to-5 was born.
We've spent barely a hundred years in this model, yet we treat it like the natural human condition. It's not. It's an industrial accident. And technology is starting to undo it.
The Artisan Returns
Today only about 10% of workers are self-employed. But that's changing. AI and the internet have made it possible for one person to do what required entire departments a generation ago.
The artisan is returning. Not with hammers and forges, but with laptops and AI. People directing their own work again, owning what they create, choosing what's meaningful over what's mandatory.
This has always been possible. It just hasn't been the default path. AI is making it the easier path.
This raises concerns about jobs disappearing. But this pattern isn't new. When tractors and industrial machinery arrived in agriculture, everyone feared mass unemployment. Instead, people found new problems to solve. New industries emerged. The machinery itself created new problems: maintenance, efficiency, distribution, logistics. And because people weren't spending all their time on food production, entirely new fields became possible.
Business is just solving problems. All successful products solve a problem. When AI solves current problems, some industries will die. But in their wake, new problems will emerge, giving birth to new businesses.
The same pattern is playing out with coding. People assumed AI would replace programmers. But coders who learn to use AI can describe what they want in plain language, let AI write the code, and then review the output because they understand what good code looks like. They're fifty times more efficient. The skill didn't become worthless. It became more valuable.
AI Amplifies, It Doesn't Replace
This is the pattern. AI amplifies human judgment, taste, and vision. It doesn't replace them.
The business owner using AI is at least ten times more productive than one who doesn't. Businesses that use it will outcompete those that don't. Employees who learn it will find new roles as old ones disappear.
AI is a tool. Tools need masters. Data needs insight. Content needs context. Success needs vision.
Anyone can ask AI to generate a viral post, or rank a thousand posts by viral potential. But what good is that without monetization? Loyalty? The things that actually make a brand work? You can ask AI to help with those too, but then you're doing something different. You're learning. You're orchestrating. You're making decisions in service of a larger vision.
AI can generate a beautiful image on command. But there's a huge difference between someone with a vision who uses AI to execute it and someone who just wants a quick image. Many artists use AI for first drafts, then take it into Photoshop to add the tweaks that make it theirs. AI has exposed what really matters in the creative process, and it was never the mechanical execution.
If you can't create art with AI, you were never an artist. You were just good at using a tool like Photoshop. Tools get replaced. Vision and agency do not.
The Requirement: Go Deeper, Not Further Away
When you ask AI to make all the decisions, you get no throughline, no theme, no personality, no vision, no context. That's what creators actually are: context creators, not content creators. The content is meaningless without context, and AI generations are the same.
This is why brands are disappearing into AI-generated sameness. They're using the same tools, following the same prompts, generating the same voice. A coffee shop sounds like a SaaS company. A yoga studio reads like a consulting firm. Scroll LinkedIn for ten seconds and you'll see five founders with the same Canva carousel, same "here's what I learned" headline, same AI-polished sincerity.
This happens when you use AI to distance yourself from the process instead of going deeper into it.
AI amplifies your existing skills and knowledge. You need skills and knowledge to begin with. If you're a marketer who just asks ChatGPT to write an ad without understanding psychology or good copy, you'll get bad output. Garbage in, garbage out. And if you're not skilled enough to judge the output, you won't know if it's good or bad.
The human in the loop needs to know what good looks like. The human sets the standard. The human engineers the inputs. The human evaluates the output.
You need to use AI to go deeper into the process, not to escape it. The people who succeed with AI use it to understand their craft better, to question their assumptions, to iterate faster. The people who get stuck are trying to use AI to avoid the work entirely.
Nothing has fundamentally changed. People just hate what's new, and that new is shining a light on what mattered all along.
The Future Is Self-Directed
I'm optimistic for a future where all the boring, repetitive tasks are handled, and humans can work purely on what's creative, strategic, and fulfilling.
When AI handles the repetitive work, it frees individuals to focus on the high-leverage tasks: decision making, output evaluation, creative direction, strategy. The things that actually matter. The things that are actually fulfilling.
Meaningful work is thinking of ideas, making decisions, and building products that solve problems worth solving.
AI is the door back to something older and more human. Self-directed work. Owning your output. Choosing what to build and when to build it. The artisan economy, rebuilt on a foundation of infinite leverage.
For those who are high-agency, curious, and ambitious enough to pursue this path, there has never been a better time to build exactly the life you want.
