by Serguey Shinder
There is a version of thinking about the future where every change is a threat, where each new capability that arrives is measured only by what it might take from me. I lived in that version for a while, and it is an exhausting place to think from, because it turns every advance into a small mourning. So I want to describe the opposite experience, the one nobody warns you about, which is the relief of watching a part of your job disappear and being glad to see it go.
For years a meaningful slice of my work was tedious in a way that added nothing to anyone. Boilerplate, repetitive setup, the mechanical translation of a clear intention into the fifty lines of ceremony required to express it. I was good at this tedium, fast at it even, and some small proud part of me had come to identify with that speed, as though being efficient at drudgery were a real skill worth protecting.
When tools arrived that could absorb that tedium, my first reaction, honestly, was a flicker of loss. If the machine can do the boilerplate, then the years I spent getting fast at boilerplate are worth less, and there is a real grief in watching a hard-won competence become a commodity. It is not nothing to have a skill devalued, even a skill you never particularly enjoyed using.
But the grief did not last, because underneath it was a truth I had been reluctant to admit. I never liked that part of the job. Nobody did. It was the toll I paid to get to the work I actually cared about, the design, the judgment, the shaping of a system, and every hour spent on ceremony was an hour stolen from the parts that were mine. Losing the drudgery did not diminish me. It returned me to the work I had wanted to do all along.
This has made me hold my predictions about the future more loosely and more hopefully. Not every capability that lands is a threat. Some of them are the arrival of something you have quietly wanted for years, the offloading of the parts of the work that were never really the point. The trick is telling the two apart, and I had been treating them as the same, guarding my drudgery with the same anxiety I should have saved for the things that actually matter.
I do not know which parts of my work will survive the next decade and which will be absorbed. But I have stopped assuming that absorption is always loss. Some of what gets taken is weight I was glad to put down, and the future arrives not only as a thief but sometimes as a colleague who volunteers for the chores. The part of my job I lost was the part I was never going to miss. What is left is the part that was worth doing, and there is more room for it now.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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