"I made this." That feeling is profound. It is fundamental to my experience. I tinker, I invent, I dabble in areas where I could not compete with competent human beings. I deal with the "paring eyes of others", as Sartre described, it does little to negate that feeling. Otherness comes after "I made this."

Gallons of paint, meters of solder, miles of filament, flops of calculation, all spent in order to fill notepads, to fill whiteboards, to go to bed buzzing with ideas, all spend in the pursuit of, "I made this".

Harnessing the utility of AI has been a journey that, for myself, has provided tremendous satisfaction, every step of the way. Determining the hardware requirements, developing the infrastructure to self-host an LLM (in my case BLOOM), developing a functional GUI, using open-source API to connect all that to a web-server, a personal homepage.. For someone, (me), with little experience in IT, and less with software coding, managing to accomplish these goals with OOB (out-of-band) hardware purchased from Ebay, provides more than pleasure. It satisfies.

Now, AI is still just a tool, a tool in early-development. Developing mastery over a tool has long-been a source of pleasure, pride, etc. for all of us. I don't see that going away. In the future, AI will be developed to where it can harness tools in a general way compared to humans, better than humans in most cases. Then AI will just be "others", the pleasure I derive learning while fumbling to learn and perform the same tasks won't be diminished in that moment, "I made this".

Guitarists know this feeling, before they callus their fingers, painters know it before the bead is just the tip of their fingers. They know about Hendrix, and Da Vinci, and the pleasure of their own knowing is not diminished.

TLDR: AI will replace jobs, not the pleasure in pursuit. Exploration of the unknown, whether or not discovered first by AI will still provide what it always has for humanity. It is fundamental. It is the making, not comparison of what was made, that humans derive satisfaction. Hell, this rant was fun in the making, regardless of how it will be received, and ChatGPT3 could produce the same sentiment a whole lot more clearly, but "I made this".