What are you building?

Work, Creativity, and Staying Human in the AI Era

photo: Kelly Sikkema

On March 29, 2024, fantasy and sci-fi author Joanna Maciejewska posted the following on X:

“You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The post went viral, with roughly 3.3M views, 92,000 likes and 21,000 reposts. Maciejewska’s post touched a raw nerve, exposing a tension many are feeling as AI proliferates into every aspect of our lives. Perhaps you’re feeling it too. From the boardroom to the kitchen table, it is a near-universal conversation.

But what Maciejewska’s post also voiced is the question of what exactly we want this technology to do (or not do) for us in our daily lives. While the answers will be as diverse and varied as we are, the question reveals a common thread, woven through a deeper, perhaps unconscious level of our thinking: by articulating what tasks we want to delegate to AIs and robots, we are telling ourselves what we value most about our daily human lives. As AI adoption accelerates and its reach into our lives deepens, every one of us is invited to consider precisely what those values are. What we learn from those answers, about ourselves and each other, will shape the course of civilization for generations to come.

The decision to delegate specific life functions or nothing at all to AI is, by implication, a statement about what matters most to us. It is a reflection of how and on what terms we want to participate in the mundanity of daily human activities. It invites us to rethink what we’re here to do with our lives, especially in what we might consider our life’s work, the role of jobs, and how we sustain our lives.

This is not a passive process. At a time when fears about widespread job loss pervade the airwaves and assumptions about what it means to “work” are being dismantled and reorganized, the AI era is forcing us to actively reexamine the notion of work itself. Where is the “human-in-the-loop,” as engineers might ask? And what exactly is the loop?

A Brief History of Work

For most of human history, daily life on earth did not include a separate activity called “work.” Human labor provided sustenance for life for one’s self, family, tribe, or village. It was defined by the needs of the moment as influenced by climate, topography, and season. As Jared Diamond points out in his Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton, 1997) the shape of the continents themselves played a fundamental role in the evolution of civilization: Eurasia’s east-west orientation allowed for the establishment of crops, animals, and resources across a band of thousands of miles of similar latitude and climate, whereas the Americas’ north-south orientation necessitated seasonal migration and continuous re-adaptation to temperate climates in order to access and cultivate food sources.

The Ju/‘hoansi, hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, are among the oldest continuous cultures on earth. Documented by anthropologist James Suzman who lived among them for decades, the Ju/‘hoansi spend roughly 15 hours per week on work, most of which was indistinguishable from leisure. 4500 miles to the north, ancient Greeks differentiated labor and leisure. Labor was seen as needed for survival. Leisure - the Greek scholē, root of the word “school” - represented the freedom to pursue knowledge.

The progressive bifurcation of labor and leisure continued into mid-18th century Britain, where, in 1771, Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill at Cromford was established. Widely considered the first true factory, it was a system that centralized not only labor but the laborers themselves. Arkwright built workers’ cottages so close to the mill that there was no separation between work and private life. Work became a place where one sold their labor in the form of time. Value was derivative of productivity; not intrinsic to life itself.

It became an ethos that defined western thought and persists to this day. In his work The Protestant Ethic (1904-5, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik), Max Weber described a quasi-doctrine of industriousness as piety. Calvinism, combined with Luther’s secular-work-as-divine-calling, held up hard work as a measure of godliness, idleness as precondition for debauchery and even evil. Long after Calvinism’s influence faded, the “iron cage” of the relentless pursuit of productivity prevails: a kind of internalized indentured servitude to the merciless master of progress.

By the mid-20th century, a new revolution was dawning. Advances in automation and technology were changing the way companies operated. Management theorist Peter Drucker first coined the term “knowledge worker” when, in his groundbreaking 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow, Drucker predicted that by the 21st century, the most valuable assets in a company would not be machines or capital, but the people who think for a living. Drucker forecasted knowledge work as the dominant form of labor in the US and Europe by the turn of the century.*

In the 67 years since, it has exploded as a broad category representing everything from IT specialists to product managers, consultants to c-suite executives. With it came a new dilemma: if “thinking” is the work, and one presumably thinks all the time, when is one not working? And how is productivity measured? When the product itself is less immediate or obvious, product-ivity becomes the metric. For knowledge workers it has meant the dissolving of boundaries between work and personal life, risking the erosion of personal relationships, of meaning derived from anything outside of one’s work.

Across each era, patterns and themes emerge. First, every civilization-changing revolutionary leap in innovation has been met by widespread fear, while heralded by others as ushering in a new golden age that would free up more of humanity’s time for leisurely pursuits - echoes of that ancient Greek ideal. Both proved to be right. Every revolution has had its winners and losers, especially at the economic, political, social, and racial margins.**

Second, through the arc of these revolutions: from agrarian life to the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the Industrial Revolutions to the Digital Revolution, and from the Digital Revolution to the AI Revolution, the purview of work has shifted from what you do (Industrial) to what you know (Digital) to who you are. With every era, work has assumed an increasingly pervasive jurisdiction over the self. We have traveled from Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things” to work itself as the measure of all things.

“What are you building?”

I overheard two young people at a cafe the other day. As they were catching up with each other, the question they exchanged was “What are you building?” I was struck by what I heard.

First, the ubiquity of the verb “build” reflects a nascent way of thinking about how we work in the AI era. Rather than “what do you do?” (as in, what is your job/career), a new vernacular has emerged. “What are you building?”

Second, “building” is an inherently process-oriented activity. To build, to be a builder, is to participate in the generative process of creating something, possibly that has never existed before. It is intrinsically optimistic, forward-looking, and creative.

This is, to me, the brightest promise of the AI era. When combined with an unprecedented availability of world-class tools to, we are poised to see some of the most astonishing achievements and creativity we have ever seen. It will happen across all domains.

But in order for this promise to be fulfilled for the greatest number of people, we need to ground this sweeping vision in a shared ethos that is best defined by two principles: democratization and discernment.

Democratization ensures the broadest accessibility of the most advanced tools available to as many as possible. It means lowering the barrier to entry economically by providing hardware and software tools for those who may have been left behind by the Digital Revolution. By doing so, we open the possibility for self-trained innovators and entrepreneurs to solve problems once thought to be unfixable.

We must also acknowledge that the “freedom to reconsider work” is not evenly distributed. It presupposes a foundation of economic security many don’t have. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that AI will likely worsen overall inequality. To ensure this doesn’t become reality, we need to address accessibility now, broadly and aggressively.

Discernment goes deeper. It speaks to the philosophical and ethical questions at the heart of our decision-making as a society. For the sake of brevity, I won’t list all of them here. I’ll tackle these in future essays.

Among the core questions:
• How do we define what it means to be “human” in an era that is increasingly hybrid, where human outputs are more and more a shared product of collaboration with AI?
• What do we delegate to machines, and what stays human? What remains uniquely human in this context, and why does it matter - not just to us personally, but to the global human community?
• How can we ensure the growth of AI and its physical infrastructure “do no harm” to the earth (Hippocrates, Chief Oren Lyons***), the life support system for our species?
• What is the role of creativity, of ownership over one’s own creative outputs and labor, and how can those be harnessed in service to what Buddha called “sammā-ājīva,” “right/whole livelihood,” that sustains our lives?

Who’s doing the dishes?

And what about our bodies? These exquisite marrowy, electric bio-suits we inhabit? As neuroscientist Richard Cytowic points out, we operate Stone Age hardware in a screen age. Physical energy is finite, and rest is essential for overall health as well as the optimal functioning of our brains. How we feel impacts how we think. Unlike our agentic or robotic counterparts, we need water, sleep, food, shelter, movement to sustain our lives.

Our brains need rest. They need boredom, play, stillness, and “offline time” to do the essential work of integrating ideas, consolidating memory, and synthesizing information. Too much input without rest starves our brains of the very process that generates fresh ideas, new insights, and to meaning. Einstein’s foundational “thought experiments” came to him while sailing Lake Geneva or playing the violin. Newton developed the theory of gravity while resting (some say napping) beneath an apple tree during a forced year off from his studies during the Great Plague. Our world has been shaped and reshaped by insights from brilliant minds at leisure - scholē - the ultimate “school” of deep human knowledge. Our ancient Greek ancestors nod in recognition. How do we center being human, in all of its idiosyncrasies and possibility, at the core of an ethos for this revolutionary time?

Asking the question at scale

Just as individuals face these questions, organizations and companies must too. Our publishing company met this moment by asking ourselves: what stays human in our work? How do we democratize our work and exercise discernment in the AI era? As creators of the bestselling nature field guides of all time, we aren’t strangers to complex projects. Our 50 year legacy was built on rigorous scholarship from thousands of the best scientists and experts in the world and includes leading reference titles in pet care for the ASPCA, decorative arts for the Smithsonian, and others. To navigate the Digital Revolution we built an infrastructure that enabled us to bring knowledge to rising generations in new ways. What started in 2018 as the new foundation for our work became, in May 2025, Fieldstone ATLAS™: Assimilation of Taxonomic data for Leverage via Automation and Scale.

Counter to the prevailing “scrape-and- share” modes of current AIs and LLMs, we decided the human-in-the-loop remains at the center of our ethos and defines its value. As hallucinated responses from AIs proliferate, we responded by evolving our methodology to scale access to knowledge - trusted, grounded, verified (by real human experts), validated knowledge - to those platforms humans are increasingly turning to for answers they can trust. Our work extends to reference knowledge from any domain. Through a commitment to human excellence, combined with the best technical tools available, we bring our core human values of trust, knowledge, accuracy, and rigor into this new era. It is our response to Maciejewska’s question. We hope that by doing so, we inspire others to do the same.

As a civilization, we certainly aren’t the first to ask these questions. What is unprecedented is the sheer scale, velocity, and stakes against which we are doing this work. In every area of our lives, we are all being challenged to consider what remains exclusively and uniquely human in our work and lives; what, if anything, becomes the domain of our new digital/robotic compatriots; and how we want to design our lives. Though our answers will be as diverse as we are, may we take up this challenge together as homo sapiens, with all the courage and commitment our human bodies can hold. It may be - indeed, is - the most important work of our lives.

Now, back to the dishes.
-S

* Drucker was right. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows management, professional, and related occupations now account for 44% of the U.S. workforce — roughly 71 million people. Globally, knowledge workers represent an estimated 30% of the labor force, synthesized from national statistical agencies. No single authoritative body tracks the category. Source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

**This may be my understatement of the year, and I hope readers will forgive the oversimplification of what is a lifetime’s work (or more) to truly explicate the intersection of these dynamics within a comprehensive history of capitalism.

***From “First, Do No Harm to the Earth,” Chief Oren Lyons’ July 2011 address at the White House. Lyons (b. 1930) is Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and has spent six decades as a global voice for Indigenous rights and environmental responsibility.

Sources & Further Reading

Joanna Maciejewska, X post, March 29, 2024

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton, 1997)

James Suzman, Work: A Deep History (Penguin, 2021)

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik)

Peter Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow (Harper & Row, 1959)

Richard Cytowic, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age (MIT Press, 2024)

Chief Oren Lyons, “Do No Harm to the Earth,” White House address, July 2011

International Monetary Fund, Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, Staff Discussion Note, January 2024

The Buddha, on sammā-ājīva (right livelihood), the Noble Eightfold Path