As a user and consumer of objects, sometimes I want a meaningful experience with a thing made lovingly by human hands. I will take a dinner cooked by my friends over take-out any day of the week even if the restaurant makes objectively better food. But sometimes I am happy to use a mass produced utilitarian object because it solves the problem. I don't have an emotional relationship with my stapler.

These two perspectives are not completely separate. In practice, every object has some mixture of human care and machine optimized productivity.

Likewise, as a producer of objects to be used by others, I want them to have a meaningful connection to me as the maker. But I also want to be able to produce more objects more efficiently so I can affect the lives of more people.

Again, those are not entirely separate stances. With my books, I hand-lettered every single word in the illustrations. But I scanned those and cleaned them up in Photoshop instead of painting over mistakes with correction fluid, and I use the magic of the web and print on demand to put those books in front of thousands of people.

I think most people have had a very uneasy truce with the amount of soulless manufactured junk in our lives versus the crafted things that we cherish. Most of us have a nagging feeling as we sit in our IKEA-filled homes watching parasocial videos on our phones that despite all the material boons industrialization has given us, we are suffering from a poverty of meaningful connection. But, also... we keep buying that stuff because stuff is nice and solves real problems.

AI has set off a bomb right in the center of that uneasy truce and now all of us are struggling to work through the psychological fallout. It is a true fact that AI will make it much easier and cheaper to produce more digital goods with real utilitarian value. It is also a true fact that it will flood our social spaces with slop and make it even harder to find a real connection with a real human in that hazy smoke of AI bullshit.

Reconciling those is the existential question of our generation. I don't believe it will be solved by taking a side. It will be solved, if at all, through some sort of more meaningful synthesis of the two halves.

I don't have answers to such as you put it the existential question of our generation(s) but I do wanted to extend some human connection in forms of appreciation that I (yes a human) really appreciated reading your comment and there were some wonders in the past which created the whole ecosystem where you can type on a keyboard and I can read on a screen and type back almost instantaneously and communicate. What an amazing time, I imagine people maybe even kings of vast lands from past feeling the time taking for mail to reach and would be just shocked by this technology and others we have created in what, a lifetime of progress and collaboration.

A famous quote that I remembered right now which feels apt: "We are more connected yet disconnected than ever before"

Have a good day, dear stranger from the other side of the world that I can send message instantaneously by just clicking reply, hopefully we meet again :)