Feeling valued is a fundamental human need. This is true within a society, a workplace, or in personal relationships. When the words or actions of others make you feel appreciated, it is an important feedback loop for supporting our sense of self worth and bolstering our self-esteem. As a social species with tribal behaviors, providing value to the people around you is a mechanism for security. So what happens when generative AI disrupts our shared senses of value? When AI makes hard things easier, and there is a broad democratization of skills—it challenges our notions about what we value and why.

Megan is highly regarded within her organization for her copywriting and editing skills. Most written work needs to pass through for editing before publication. But now that her coworkers use ChatGPT, they have become less dependent on Megan, and she notices that work is being published without her review. To her chagrin, the AI-edited pieces are pretty good.

Andy has been a software engineer for over a decade. His knowledge of .NET and JavaScript have made him indispensable at the company, and his niche experience put his skills in high demand. But now, with the appropriate context, workflow, and prompts, Claude Code can write code and build features in a quarter of the time. Andy rolled his eyes at first, and made comments about how poor the quality of generated code is because “it’s just pattern-recognition and AI can’t understand what it’s building”—but then he saw how Janet was using Claude Code, and it depressed him. The code quality was remarkable, and even had resilient unit tests baked in.

The Emotional Cost of Skill Devaluation

Deep research tools undermine the value we place on UX and other types of researcher. It’s much harder for photographers, illustrators, and artists to sell work when Gen AI can create visuals in a fraction of the time and cost. What happens when you still place a high value on the skills you have cultivated, through toil, sweat, and hours of sacrifice, but you see the value of those skills diminishing around you? The intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are skewed, and I fear that for those of us who rely on skills and expertise as the means of establishing our sense of worth, to ourselves and others, we may be in for some emotionally rough times.

If there is a silver lining, perhaps it is in how we frame things, and a call to action to evolve our sense of what we value and why.

Reframing Value

Let’s take code as an example. People (including myself) have spent years learning programming languages so that we can tell computers what to do. We invested that time because we see the potential for what computers are capable of, what they can do well, and what they can do faster and more reliably, than humans. People get masters degrees in computer science, because we live in a world that’s now underpinned by software and technology. And then, as if almost overnight, we taught computers how to speak human languages, and suddenly our ability to write code became a heck of a lot less valuable.

But with this same example, perhaps it is not your knowledge of syntax, or your ability to write in a certain code, that is where your value lies. If your identity is grounded in a skill that has transience, then you can certainly expect some disappointment. The skill is in your ability to design. It’s in the architecture. If there is a casualty as a result of agentic coding tools, it will be among those who know how to code what they are told, but not how to design systems, and cultivate habitable architecture. The ability to design smart solutions, by being able to recognize good and bad quality, and steer the codebase in a healthy direction (whether that code is written by humans, computers, or both), provides value. Being able to collaborate with peers across disciplines to understand and align on goals and workflows will continue to bring value. The bar will raise—simply getting things past QA will not be uniquely valuable. Delivering features at a higher level of quality, in a way that decreases not increases technical debt, and in ways that other can refactor easily will be critical.

”You spend half your life studying and learning secret codes so that you can command machines. And then, almost overnight, machines learned how to communicate in our native languages, and all your technical spellbook seems a lot less magical.”

The Economic Pressure Behind AI Adoption

We see businesses doubling down on AI as a means to reduce costs and improve productivity. In certain instances, this is driven by greed and putting profit over people. In many cases it’s the same giant tech companies that created all these jobs—hiring and firing recklessly—now boast their ability to replace people with AI. But for many smaller organizations, embracing AI may be a necessary step to survive in an economy where cost of living continues to increase, operational costs continue to increase, and yet people buying products and services are being pressured to reduce their spend.

In this economy, there is no award for charging more and taking longer to ship buggy code.

So, with the resources available, we all need to consider what things we value more than other things. What things do we want to protect as being human or people-driven, and what things can we acknowledge we can do better with the assistance of machine learning and AI?

Most People Don't Want AI-Everything

There is already a growing backlash in sentiment toward AI, especially among younger generation of professionals. The AI-generated content filling social feeds and email in-boxes is repulsive to those who can pick up the scent. AI-generated artwork feels cringey more often than not—even when it’s technically executed well. Dealing with an AI on the phone or in chat, when you are frustrated or upset, is not well regarded by most—even more so when it’s not disclosed up front.

— Dennis Kardys

When Market and Cultural Forces Collide

My recommendation is not to look at things in terms of black and white, when it comes to broad skills.

Perhaps we value that deep research tools can scour the internet and online sources faster than humans, and so using those tools can have value. Perhaps we also value human expertise as a means of calling BS on inaccurate insights, conducting research with other humans, and exercising empathy for how business decisions impact people. We can decide this and decide not to allow AI to displace the value of this.

While AI tools can help people screen their written work for grammar and spelling errors, and make copy-editing recommendations, we can also decide to value human perspective, journalistic expertise and integrity, and invest in human content. We can decide that editorial direction and judgment goes far beyond structural recommendations, and can lead writers to produce better, more relevant pieces.

In all aspects of work and life, we should ask ourselves where, by design, we want to preserve a human touch.

— Dennis Kardys

Choosing What Stays Human

Where does our craft and experience provide value versus where are our egos just holding on because of the sunken cost of the effort we put into learning a skill?

We can reflect on the need for people to work, contribute and feel valued within our society and place value on that, and protect that. We can balance our need to make or save money with a value we place on things like the environment, information privacy, and human perspective.

It’s tempting to focus on the short-term and replace human expertise with AI when it seems to provide a short-cut to solve problems. And it can be tempting to reject AI because of our human hubris. But what our society looks like seven generations from now is shaped by the choices we make about what we value in the present.

— Dennis Kardys