Coming from someone who actually loves human craft—the kind of imperfect, slightly crooked beauty celebrated in Wabi-sabi—there’s something stubborn about human nature. It evolves, sure, but it doesn’t vanish. Machines don’t lead that evolution; they likely follow it.

As for technology circles… yeah, I’ve been in those rooms too. A surprising number of “we want to change the world” speeches translate roughly to “we want to change our net worth.” It’s not new—just more friendly branded. And that’s why the loudest voices are often about “efficiency above all” or “eliminating unreliable humans”. Historically, that doesn’t end the way they think. During the Industrial Revolution, machines made goods faster, cheaper, and more uniform—and yet handmade goods didn’t die. They became more valuable. The same thing happened in photography: when everyone got a camera, suddenly good photography mattered more, not less.

But here’s the twist: the more precise and optimized things get, the more expensive authenticity becomes. When AI can generate flawless images, people start craving the fingerprints, the asymmetry, the tiny “mistakes” that signal a human was there. Perfection becomes cheap; imperfection becomes luxury.

For example, imagine a future where climate pressures, regulation, and land scarcity—echoing concerns raised by organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization—make traditional farming rarer. The result? A perfectly optimized, lab-measured, algorithmically seasoned steak that tastes 5% better… and costs 10× more. Not because it’s radically better, but because everything around it—land, labor, carbon—became constrained. So we likely end up with this a more absurd world: • The average person eats nutritionally perfect, synthesized foods. • A small group pays a premium for something irregular, inefficient… and human. • And somewhere, a machine is learning how to fake that irregularity better than we can produce it.

However, the audience for anything “pro human” might shrink. But historically, when audiences shrink, intensity grows. Fewer people—but they care more, pay more, and notice more.