I was sitting at my desk watching an OpenAI livestream just before Halloween, approaching the 58-minute mark of a fairly unspectacular 62-minute broadcast. I admit that I wasn’t listening very well at this point. Let’s get this over with, friends, I’m ready for lunch!
Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, had just finished speaking about AI’s role in mass layoffs when CEO Sam Altman suddenly turned to him and asked, “What do you think meaningfulness will look like?”
The question blinded me. I didn’t expect a billionaire CEO to think about such a question. And that got my full attention.
What do you think meaning will look like?
Pachocki took a long pause, then gave a thoughtful response about the ability to understand much more about the world and the incredible variety of knowledge that would become accessible as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced.
The livestream is over. My work day continued.
But I couldn’t let it go. The question still haunts me – sitting at stoplights in my car, on walks with my dog, thinking about it for a few moments before falling asleep. I corner friends to ask them what they think about purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.
What will meaning look like in the age of AI?
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Meaning beyond AI automation
I thought about it for a long time. So here’s my answer, Sam.
Meaning and purpose are rooted in the things we personally value and invest energy into. We’ll find it in the things that the AI generation can’t automate, but we’ll also find it in I always do these things despite the AI.
Automation doesn’t necessarily diminish the value of doing something by hand. We’ve mechanized crafts for centuries, but people still knit blankets, roll dough by hand, spread oil on canvas, and write letters by hand because it’s the act of doing it that is so satisfying. Fulfillment is not found in the output. This is reflected in our participation.
As generative AI seeps into every nook and cranny of our lives, I am much more moved by the processes and craftsmanship than ever before. In an age where so much online culture seems designed for brain rot, I’ve found myself watching anime because the artistry is astounding, taking pottery classes just to work with my hands, and reading interviews with film sound designers because I’m captivated by the way they hear the world and translate it to film. These are all things that machines could imitate, and perhaps even execute perfectly, but what I find meaningful is the fact that I am part of the process. I am involved in time, effort, curiosity, attempt.
Meaning is not exclusive to what AI cannot do. It’s what we choose to do anyway. Not because the technology is not sophisticated enough, but because it is not human. There is something about witnessing human skill, human attention, human care that seems more valuable than ever. It’s not nostalgia. It’s simply recognition.
The value of analog and shared experiences
When ChatGPT can spit out essays in seconds, Sora can create photorealistic videos, NotebookLM can surface connections across entire libraries, and generative chatbots like Claude, Gemini, and Grok are taking on more and more of the cognitive and creative work, the tangible and the imperfect seem newly evocative to me. I’m relearning how much I need analog experiences.
Last month at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, I was fascinated by a 30-plus minute glassblowing demonstration. The artist worked molten glass at temperatures above 2,000 degrees, shaping it with his breath, his tools, and decades of embodied knowledge. I’ve seen him compensate for imperfections with gravitas and finesse, turning what could have been a flaw into intentional design elements. The crowd around me was completely silent, hypnotized. We weren’t just looking at the making of an object. We watched a human being negotiate in real time with physics, chance and his own limits. No AI can reproduce this specific negotiation, this particular waltz with materiality and risk. The problem wasn’t that AI couldn’t blow glass, but rather that we were all present and sharing in this experience.
The scarcity of analog will also become even more valuable as digital spreads to infinity. While I was writing this review, I received a note in the mail from my best friend, Sydney. The sight of her writing – as familiar as mine, with its distinctive slant and the way she loops her Ys – made me cry. This writing contains it. His hand ran over this paper. She thought of me while forming these letters. An AI could perfectly forge its scenario, but it could not forge the fact that it was there, pen in hand, thinking of me.
AI chatbots can do a lot of your “thinking” and outperform your work tasks, so let’s all embrace practical activities and skills where the body is central. I wouldn’t be surprised to see martial arts, boxing, yoga, rock climbing, hiking, and dancing become more popular as powerful antidotes to AI oversaturation.
Remember that the brain is also a physical reality. Even a sedentary writer playing with diction and syntax will find meaning by trying, choosing, deleting, and shaping. An AI model can write prose or generate a video of someone dancing or boxing, but it can’t generate muscle memory, nor how a dancer interprets music in that specific, irreplaceable moment, nor how a writer struggles with a sentence until it says what he needs. That’s just for us humans.
The human parts
This is what I keep coming back to: meaning will only come from what drives us. And artifice will never be what moves us. Not really, not in the way that matters.
Purpose, identity, meaning, salvation and many other important things are linked to disorder, inefficiency, frustration and misunderstanding. These are not just characteristics of humanity, since errors, quirks and failures also appear in the results of generative AI. But for us humans, these errors have very real issues. At stake are our efforts, our ego, our hope… our very lifespan as we learn, grow, age, tire, and need rest, all in such a limited time frame. When we mess up, we try again, and that process is what changes us and brings us value.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence. This is something I discovered while watching the movie The Smashing Machine, when Emily Blunt’s character breaks a pretty blue bowl into many delicate pieces. Later in the film, she offers the ceramic bowl repaired with gold and explains the art of kintsugi, a technique rooted in wabi-sabi that uses lacquer dusted with gold, silver, or platinum powder to repair broken pottery. The result is often asymmetrical and the flaws obvious – evidence that they were made by human hands, subject to human errors and limitations.
We are moved by the evidence of other consciences like ours. By proof that someone else was there, attentive, making choices, leaving traces. Through the knowledge that something costs effort, risk or time – all of which AI makes frictionless. In a world where AI can generate “optimized” images, “optimized” prose, “optimized” art, the imperfect takes on even more value. The mark of a human hand will become the signature of meaning itself.
Sam, in the age of AI, meaning will look like everything AI was designed to eliminate. Slowness. Inefficiency. Imperfection. The risk. The human parts. The embodied and deeply human experiences we continue to have not because we to have but because doing them changes us in so many wonderful ways.
