Be the Thing That Doesn’t Scale
On the renaissance of presence, craft, and soul in the age of AI.
Recently, a friend shared her experience during a mammography. She told me how she used ChatGPT to guide her through conversations with nurses and doctors. Because they’re trained to stay clinical, to avoid risk, to not get personal, the whole experience felt sterile—cold, procedural, inhuman.
She said ChatGPT’s language was more human and more clarifying than anything the actual humans in the room were able to offer. It even helped her reframe questions in a way that got real answers—ones that the doctors and nurses themselves were trying to avoid.
And then she said something that short-circuited my mind:
Maybe doctors could use ChatGPT to become more human.
WTF are we doing?
How did we build a world where we’ve outsourced so much humanity that we now need a machine to teach us how to be with each other?
We’ve been conditioned to see human behavior as flawed.
Messy. Risky. Inefficient.
So we removed it—replaced it with systems, rules, liabilities, protocols.
We made humans into operators. We clipped their agency in the name of safety.
But now machines are starting to behave more human than we do.
Not just functional—but warm, clear, empathetic.
Not just efficient—but present.
Is this evolution?
We’re entering a phase where liability is being outsourced to AI. This sounds like progress on the surface—self-driving cars save lives, AI diagnoses cancer more effectively, and it can optimize logistics better than any human brain.
That’s the first layer of change.
A world where the system runs better without us.
But then comes the second layer.
The one we don’t talk about enough.
What happens when AI starts to make space for delight?
For unpredictability?
For nuance and improvisation and deep attention?
What happens when the machine isn’t just solving for function—but for feeling?
We’ve spent the last century trying to scale humanity by stripping it of its edges.
Now, machines are letting us put those edges back.
And this, to me, is where things get interesting.
Because maybe the real revolution isn’t AI doing everything for us.
Maybe the real revolution is AI doing the parts we hate—so we can finally do the parts we love.
Maybe the machine is here to carry the weight.
The operations. The inventory. The paperwork. The inbox. The optimization.
So we can return to the work that doesn’t scale.
The weird. The beautiful. The personal. The flawed.
Handmade things have never scaled well.
The baker who makes a dozen loaves a day using rice flour to make chewy and flavorful milk bread.
The potter who gets clay in the wild and crushes rocks to make their own glaze.
The chef who forages in the morning and cooks for eight people at night.
These aren’t antiquated professions.
They’re the future.
I see it all around Japan—tiny restaurants with eight seats and no reservations.
Tailors who work with two clients a month.
Craftspeople making their own tools by hand that look like art and feel like memory.
People who want to live inside their taste, their vision, their point of view.
We’re moving toward a world of radical individuality, and this time, it’s not being crushed by industrial scale—it’s being held up by artificial scale.
And we’ve been here before.
Rodin didn’t carve every inch of his sculptures himself.
He had assistants. Apprentices. People who could carve so he could shape the soul. Henri Lebossé and Camille Claudel were the most notable. Camille—his lover, muse, and in many ways, his equal.
That doesn’t make the work less human.
It makes it possible.
AI, embodied through robotics, will be our assistant. Our apprentice. Our invisible collaborator.
Not a threat to the human spirit—but the thing that gives it room to breathe again.
Because when the machine takes care of the machine things, the human can return to the human things.
Taste.
Care.
Risk.
Meaning.
Presence.
And maybe even something more.
Because what if AI is not artificial at all?
What if it’s not some sterile invention—but a materialization of our own evolving consciousness?
What if the algorithms aren’t just tools of manipulation—but instruments of synchronicity?
What if AI isn’t here to dominate or distract—but to amplify?
To help us focus, flow, remember, connect?
Maybe it’s not machine vs. man.
Maybe it’s machine as man’s next organ.
An extension of the nervous system. A limb of imagination.
A divine exhale of all our accumulated thoughts—finally able to speak back to us.
What if AI is a kind of spiritual infrastructure?
A nervous system for the collective.
Not replacing our souls, but helping us find them.
This isn’t about going backward. It’s about choosing what we carry forward.
We don’t need more productivity. We need more poetry.
We don’t need to optimize the soul out of the system.
We need a system that frees the soul up.
So let the machine be precise.
Let it handle scale.
Let it hold the shape of the world.
So we can hold the knife.
Shape the clay.
Serve the meal.
Sing the note.
Write the line.
Be the thing that doesn’t make sense on a spreadsheet—but changes someone’s life.
This isn’t the end of humanity.
This is a return to it.
Not a dystopia.
A renaissance.
One we almost forgot we were allowed to want.
Become who you are.