A goalkeeper learns something early. Saving the shot doesn't end anything.
You dive, you get a glove to it, the crowd makes its noise. Then the ball goes out for a corner and you get up and do it again. Ninety minutes of that. Then next Sunday. I played in goal in Marseille until my knee gave out, and nobody ever told me the game would one day be finished. It never was. That was the point of it.
I think about that when people tell me the machines are about to finish work.
I. The promise
The promise is old. Every new machine arrives carrying it. The loom, the tractor, the washing machine, the spreadsheet. This one will do the hard part, and you'll be left with the afternoon.
Tim Ferriss, a man who sold a whole generation the four-hour week, doesn't believe it anymore:
"That is why AI creating infinite leisure time, where people spend all of their time basket weaving and painting with watercolors. is I think a completely false promise. No technology has ever delivered that. Many have been ushered in with that promise, none have delivered."
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show
He says what happens instead. Most of the uses he's seen take things "that probably shouldn't be done at all," and do them "very, very quickly." The ending is the part I wrote down in the café:
"It will create much more work, much more stress, and you will drown in the unimportant."
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show
So the boulder isn't gone. There's just more of it, and it rolls faster.
II. The conveyor belt
The best description of the new work came from a man who builds it. Felix Rieseberg leads engineering on one of Anthropic's Claude products. On Marina Mogilko's show he described his old routine:
"it very quickly dawned on me, I'm just a conveyor belt for Claude, right? Like I go look at our crashes, pick one up, move it over, drop it off in front of Claude. I'm like, please fix this."
Felix Rieseberg, Marina Mogilko
Read it twice. A skilled engineer, at the front of the most advanced industry on earth, carrying things from one pile to another. Pick up, move over, drop off. Camus has a line for this in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work." He wrote it in 1942. It still fits.
Rieseberg's fix was sensible. He gave Claude the crash data directly, so he could stop carrying it. Then he went looking for the next thing to carry. That's the honest shape of it. You automate the belt, and you become the belt for something else.
III. Busier than ever
The people selling the machines don't hide this. They're proud of it. Sam Altman, talking to Matthew Berman, on what happened to programmers:
"Coders are never gonna be busier than they've been. And coders are never gonna have more of an impact and make more money."
Sam Altman, Matthew Berman
His explanation is that the world wanted "way more software than any of us thought." I believe him. When something gets cheap, people want more of it. Rieseberg says the same thing from the other side:
"We've always said ideas are cheap. That was true. And we said execution kind of expensive, but it's it's gotten cheaper over time. And now execution has become extremely cheap."
Felix Rieseberg, Marina Mogilko
Put Altman and Rieseberg next to Ferriss and you get the whole picture. Doing things got cheap. So we do more things. The hours don't shrink. They fill.
My friends hear this and reach for despair. They wear it well, like a good jacket. Work is pointless, they say, the machine will take it or bury us in it, either way we lose. On Tom Bilyeu's show the conversation started from a poll saying "most Americans no longer believe that hard work pays off." I understand the feeling. I don't think it's the right conclusion.
IV. What gets taken
The more interesting confession is what Altman says the machine takes.
"But but there is a real thing being lost here, which is this is like of great enjoyment. Like the the most fun part of my job are the really hard problems."
Sam Altman, Matthew Berman
He hasn't looked at a line of code in about a year, he says. He used to write small programs for fun. He doesn't think he'll do it again, or if he does, it'll be "like a revolutionary war reenactment."
That is the trade, said plainly by the man who benefits most from it. The machine doesn't take the tedious part first. It takes the part you were proud of. The hard problem, the one that made you better. What's left is the belt. Pick up, move over, drop off.
Altman says he doesn't have an answer. I like him more for saying it.
V. The walk back down
Camus didn't care much about Sisyphus at the top of the hill. He cared about the walk back down. "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me." That's when Sisyphus knows exactly what his situation is, and goes back anyway.
On Chris Williamson's show, a few men were talking about the value of work that goes nowhere. One of them put Camus into the language of video games better than any professor could:
"I had this line in my mind that um Sisyphus is still racking up experience points. Yeah. Dude, he's grinding."
Chris Williamson's show
It's a joke, and it's right. The boulder was never the point. The pushing was. What the machine threatens isn't our work. It's our part in it. It can give us endless boulders and take away the pushing, so all that's left is watching it roll.
So refuse two things. Refuse the despair that says work is pointless now. Refuse the hope that says the machine will finally set us free. Neither one has ever been true.
Keep one hard thing for yourself, one the machine could do faster. Do it slowly, and do it badly at first. Camus kept goal for his university club in Algiers and later said what he knew about morality and duty, he owed to football. He didn't mean winning. He meant getting up after the shot.
Then go swimming. The afternoon was never something the machines had to give us.
It was always ours.
Sources
Tim Ferriss, "Q&A with Tim — The 4-Hour Workweek in a World of AI, The 4-Hour Body After 40, and More"
Marina Mogilko with Felix Rieseberg, "Claude Engineering Lead: Why Giving AI Full Access Changes Everything"
Matthew Berman with Sam Altman, "Sam Altman: RSI, AI Consciousness, OpenAI's New Hardware, Compute, and more!"
Tom Bilyeu with Coleman Hughes, "The Brutal Truth About Why Hard Work Feels Pointless"
Chris Williamson with Dr K, Joe Hudson and Connor Beaton, "4 Men Share How They Hit Rock Bottom (and got out)"
Quotes come from auto-generated transcripts. They are trimmed for length but not reworded. The Camus lines are from The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), in Justin O'Brien's translation. His remark about football is usually traced to a 1957 piece for the magazine of his old club, Racing Universitaire d'Alger.
