I think where we actually converge is on the phenomenon itself rather than on any moral judgment about it.

What I was trying to point at is how strange it is to watch this happen in real time. You can see something unfolding directly in front of you. You can observe systems improving, replacing workflows, changing incentives. None of it is abstract. And yet the implications of what is happening are so negative for some people that the mind simply refuses to integrate them. It is not that the facts are unknown. It is that the outcome is psychologically intolerable.

At that point something unusual happens. People do not argue with conclusions, they argue with perception. They insist the thing they are watching is not really happening, or that it does not count, or that it will somehow stop before it matters. It is not a failure of intelligence or ethics. It is a human coping mechanism when reality threatens meaning, livelihood, or future stability.

Meaning and intrinsic motivation absolutely matter here. The tragedy is not that meaningful work suddenly becomes meaningless. It is that it can remain meaningful while becoming economically unsustainable. That combination is brutal. But denying the shift does not preserve meaning. It only delays the moment where a person has to decide how to respond.

What I find unsettling is not the fear or the resistance. It is watching people stand next to you, looking at the same evidence, and then effectively unsee it because accepting it would force a reckoning they are not ready for.

>I'm unsure if you've written it with AI-assistance, but even if that's the case, I'll tolerate it.

Even if it was, the world is changing. You already need to tolerate AI in code, it's inevitable AI will be part of writing.

> the outcome is psychologically intolerable [...] People do not argue with conclusions, they argue with perception [...] accepting it would force a reckoning they are not ready for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Or perhaps, a form of grief.

> denying the shift does not preserve meaning

I think you meant to write:

"denying the shift does not preserve sustainability"

as "meaning" need not be preserved by anything. The idea here is that meaning -- stemming from the profession being supplanted -- is axiomatic.

And with that correction applied, I agree -- to an extent anyway. I hope that, even if (or "when") the mainstream gets swayed by AI, pockets / niches of "hand-crafting" remain sustainable. We've seen this with other professions that used to be mainstream but have been automated away at large scale.