A task is a thing you do.
A craft is a thing you understand.
The machines are coming for the tasks.
They already write the boilerplate.
They already draft the email.
They already produce the first version
of the thing you used to charge for.
If your value was the task,
this is frightening.
If your value was the craft,
this is a promotion.
The task is the typing.
The craft is knowing
what should be typed,
and why,
and what to do
when the obvious answer is wrong.
A machine can generate a function.
It cannot feel that the function
solves the wrong problem elegantly.
That feeling is the craft.
For a long time
the task and the craft
came bundled together.
You had to do the boring parts
to earn the interesting ones.
Now the bundle is breaking.
The boring parts are being taken.
The interesting parts are being handed back.
That is only a threat
if the boring parts
were all you ever really had.
So ask an honest question.
When the task is automated,
what is left of what you do?
If the answer is "nothing,"
that is not the machine's fault.
That is a signal
to go deeper
into the part it cannot reach.
Taste.
Judgment.
Knowing which problem is worth solving.
Knowing when done is done.
Caring about the person
on the other end of the work.
None of that is a task.
All of it is craft.
The future does not erase the craftsman.
It erases the person
who was only ever
executing the steps.
So stop guarding the steps.
Let the machine have them.
Take the hours it gives you back
and pour them into the thing
that was always the real work,
the understanding
the task was only ever
a way of expressing.
Keep the craft.
The tasks were never you.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
