humans, hardwork and ai

for the last three hundred years, human progress has been built on one thing: effort. people left their homes to settle new lands. they built roads, railways, bridges and entire cities from nothing. they laid telegraph wires across oceans, so that a message that once took weeks could arrive in minutes. every industry we rely on today exists because someone worked hard, for a long time, on a problem that seemed impossible.

the computer is a good example. in 1946, eniac, one of the first general-purpose electronic computers, weighed about 30 tons and filled a room of roughly 1,800 square feet. it could perform about 5,000 additions per second, and the room had to be cooled constantly to stop the machine from overheating. by the late 1990s, a home computer with a pentium chip could still take several minutes to copy a large file from one folder to another. today, the chip inside an ordinary phone performs billions of operations every second. that is roughly a million times faster than eniac, and it fits in your pocket.

the pattern behind all of this is simple. whenever a person looked at something and thought, “there has to be a better way to do this,” the work began. it continued until a better version existed, and then someone improved that version too. this restless human mind is the reason life today is safer and more comfortable than at any point in history.

and yet the latest product of all this effort is now changing effort itself. artificial intelligence was built by human minds, using decades of accumulated knowledge and experience. now it is making thinking cheap. tasks that once required hours of focused work, such as writing, coding, researching, planning and analyzing, can be completed in seconds. human thought is becoming a commodity.

this comes at a cost. in 2025, researchers at the mit media lab studied people writing essays with and without chatgpt. those who used chatgpt showed weaker connectivity across their brains, and most of them could not accurately quote from essays they had “written” only minutes earlier. the study was small, with just 54 participants, but its findings are hard to ignore. in the same year, a survey by microsoft and carnegie mellon university of 319 knowledge workers found that the more people trusted ai, the less critical thinking they reported doing. the lesson is straightforward: when a machine does the thinking, the human mind practices less, and a mind that practices less grows weaker.

this matters because hard work is not only a way to earn a living. it is one of the foundations of a healthy human life, for the mind and for the body. work gives life structure and purpose. a large analysis combining more than 300 studies found that about 34% of unemployed people experienced psychological problems, compared with about 16% of people in work. work gives people a reason to wake up, a place to be and a sense that they matter.

a working mind is also a protected mind. a 2024 study in the journal neurology followed thousands of people in norway and found that those whose jobs demanded the least thinking faced a noticeably higher risk of cognitive decline later in life than those whose jobs demanded the most. the brain works like a muscle: it stays strong through use. the body is no different. this is why the loss of effortful thinking is so serious. if people stop doing long stretches of focused work, they lose a source of purpose, health, stability and happiness.

paul graham, the co-founder of y combinator, recently tweeted: “there may not be many people left in 10 years who can write, or want to read, things longer than a page or two. but there will be at least a few of us, and we’ll be a powerful club.” the ability to think deeply is becoming rare, and whatever is rare becomes valuable. the people who keep this ability will hold an enormous advantage over those who lose it.

in september 2026, anthropic’s economics team published a model of how ai might reshape the american economy by 2030. in one scenario, ai becomes capable of doing half of all knowledge work, and wages for knowledge workers stop rising. in its most extreme scenario, ai outperforms humans at most knowledge work, knowledge workers’ wages fall by more than 10%, and unemployment rises beyond the levels usually seen in a recession. the economy grows richer in every scenario, but in the more dramatic ones, a smaller share of that wealth reaches workers.

these are scenarios, not certainties, and the report is careful to say that the future is not fixed. still, they deserve serious attention. most people, myself included, would choose a life of knowledge work over one of physical labour. not everyone is a genius, and not everyone can easily retrain for a new career. if millions of knowledge workers lose their income without a clear path to new work, the result could be widespread hardship and social unrest. i have always believed in adapting to change rather than resisting it, and i never expected to write something like this. but if a technology threatens the livelihoods of millions of people without a clear plan for creating new jobs, then governments must do more to protect those workers. they must also think carefully about how quickly, and how widely, that technology is deployed.

times are changing. many companies profit from keeping people distracted, and a powerful new technology is making thinking optional. in this environment, the ability to focus for long periods is no longer ordinary. it is a competitive advantage, and perhaps a form of protection. the first step is honesty about how you spend your time.

that is why i built think in numbers. you describe your day in plain words, and it turns your notes into a clear 24-hour breakdown. you see exactly how many hours went into focused work and how many quietly slipped away. in a world that is making effort optional, measuring your effort is how you keep it.

try it at thinkinnumbers.co.