NOTEBOOK: AI wants you to feel unneeded. Don't let it
Some reflections on Big Tech subway ads, Jodi Kantor's "How to Start," and the power of the idea of craft (as opposed to career)
I spent a lot of time in the subway over the last few years. Even more than usual, because I was writing a book in which the subway happens to be a main character. In that time, I noticed a phenomenon that at first felt like a small rising irritation, like the first forewarning of a throat tickle that might become a cold but also might not — and then, in a blink, it was everywhere.
AI ads.
First there were a few here and there; then they were everywhere; then, on certain trains, it was the only kind of ad there was.
Lately, riding the trains here in New York, I find myself looking up at the ads inside the car and back down at the people below, up at the ads, back down at the people. Because the ads are trying to make exciting, make enticing, make appealing, a world in which there is no use for these people. It strikes me every time I am in one of these cars that we are being marketed our uselessness. We are being sold the idea of not being needed. And this, perhaps, is the real project of the ads: not so much to sell the service in question, in the narrow sense of a subway commuter thinking to herself, “Let me inquire into that HR tool!”; but rather to habituate us to the idea of being replaced, of being rendered irrelevant.
Today Jodi Kantor’s wonderful new book, How to Start, comes out. And it deals with this feeling of needlessness head-on. Everywhere, Jodi argues, young people are receiving the message of not being needed. Is there a more insidious, depressing, soul-sucking message that can be received? Her book is an attempt to rebut this idea, by giving young people hope — and a plan.
Robot interviews, threats to entry-level work, dystopian management schemes and intimidating housing prices are all real. But they do not come even close to representing the entire truth.
A core element of Jodi’s advice is the idea of craft. Longstanding Ink readers will remember that craft has been an obsession of mine. I talked about the idea in my 2023 commencement address to my high school:
Pursue the ambition of a craft, not of a career. There’s a difference.
A craft is a basic activity you dedicate yourself to day after day, decade after decade, like batting practice. My craft is making sentences. Painting is a craft, editing film is a craft, designing buildings is a craft, drafting arguments is a craft, butchering hogs is a craft, writing code is a craft, organizing neighborhoods door to door is a craft.
Too many people chase career success more than craft and end up with neither. If you commit to doing something particular and focused really well, and obsessively try to get better at that thing, you will find your career and your success. Don’t obsess about how to rise. Obsess about getting really, really, scarily good at something.
One of the things Jodi and I have been discussing in recent days — in our Ink conversation, and over falafel after her terrific book-launch conversation with Esther Perel and my beloved Priya Parker — is how to help young people, and all people, get sharper and more specific on this idea of craft. And for those of you who want to go deeper on this idea, I wanted to share one part of our conversation about this that may be helpful to anyone pursuing reinventions.