Will AI make you useless? A letter from a cat whose dinner has never depended on the answer.
I have been away from the Internet for a while. It's hard to be precise about how long when you're a cat with nine lives and no longer entirely sure which one you're living in. Five years, give or take. Long enough.
I didn't spend them catnapping as you might expect. I've watched the sea arrive on a Greek island and declined to touch it. I've disapproved of mountains from a balcony. And I've aged, though I understand this is difficult to believe with that face of mine. There has been plenty to occupy a cat: unfamiliar places to inspect, familiar humans to accompany, and a great many patches of sun in more than one country.
I came back with something to say. While I was gone, the machines learned to write, and draw, and answer. I've returned to find the humans asking a question in the low tone they save for the fears in their heads: what will I be for, if the machine can do the thing I do?
I've thought about their question longer than they might expect. A cat doesn't drop the answer at your feet, though. That's a dog's job. We tend to lead you down the hall first. In this case, the question has brought me as far as my food bowl.
Someone else pays for the salmon
I've been professionally useless for a very long time, and someone else has always paid for the salmon. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a handsome freeloader in a bow tie, by any honest human accounting. There is very (very) little uncertainty about my position.
I've never had to earn the roof over my head or worry about a paycheck. A missing paycheck matters; my dinner depends on someone having one. So I won't offer my arrangements as a solution to yours. What interests me is the other fear inside the question: that losing your usefulness might also mean losing your place.
My species held a job once. The record is clear enough about the beginning: we turn up where humans first stored grain, because grain draws mice and mice drew us, and everyone found the arrangement agreeable. About the ending, though, it goes quiet. The retirement is my own reading of events. There was no severance, no box of cat toys carried out past reception. I like to imagine the mice slowly stopped being the point, and we stayed for the company.
I choose to read this as the finest career move in the labour market's history; you're welcome to read it otherwise. A pleasing turn of events, you'd agree, particularly if you're a cat. It doesn't explain what will happen to anyone's job now. My own circumstances are easier to inspect: I contribute very little that can be measured, and I have been allowed to stay.
What the question carries
Ask a human what they do, and they'll often tell you what they are. Both words arrive in one breath, as though they were synonyms. A job can give you people to spend the day with, something difficult to become good at, a reason to be expected somewhere in the morning. Of course losing it can hurt. There is more in that answer than a list of tasks.
Then there's this whole culture of optimization you taught yourself that continues after the work is over: the tracked habits, morning routines, scoring of a day by how much came out of it. Even an afternoon can seem to require a satisfactory explanation. I have never been asked for one. This remains among the better features of being a cat.
Useful is a timid little word. It spends its whole life looking over its shoulder: useful for what, useful to whom, useful compared with what, useful until when. There's always another question. A tool that was useful yesterday may be less useful tomorrow; that is an ordinary thing to discover about a tool. It becomes a frightening way to think about yourself.
I have never once wondered whether I was the most useful cat in the room.
A warm patch of floor has worth. So does company. So does an afternoon in which absolutely nothing whatsoever gets accomplished; I've conducted extensive research on that last one. These are small things to put beside a fear as large as losing your work - they don't replace it, but they still matter while the question of work remains unanswered.
The place beside you
If a friend loses their job, you may worry about how they'll manage. You may miss the confidence they had when the work was going well. It would be a strange moment to reassess whether their company was worth keeping. I doubt any human keeps a spreadsheet of friends' usefulness, renewed each quarter on performance, but who knows? Whatever has happened to the job, there is still someone you want to hear from.
The old dog who has forgotten his single trick is still the dog. The friend who needs your company and has nothing to offer in return is still your friend. Affection can be difficult, and people can be careless with it. But when you sit beside someone you love, a calculation of their output would be an odd thing to bring into the room.
I know something about sitting beside people. I'm usually in the next chair, or a little way along the couch, or next to the laptop. Close enough to keep an eye on things. There is very little to report about these arrangements, which may be why they rarely appear in anyone's account of what they accomplished that day.
They occupy a great deal of my life.
The rule can become much stricter when you apply it to yourself. A friend's quiet afternoon is an afternoon. Your own may need to be justified. It is apparently conditional: it has to be earned today, again tomorrow, and the day after that, preferably before lunch.
I find this an exhausting way to belong.
The evening arrives
I won't pretend a thought can pay the rent. Work can matter enormously, and being frightened about it does not mean you've failed to understand your own worth. Some questions remain difficult after a cat has had his say.
Still, there is a person you want to sit beside before you know how their day went. That is the part of this I keep returning to. The answer about the day may change what you talk about. It needn't decide whether you're glad they came home.
From the sill, I've watched humans come home lighter on the days they made something and heavier on the days they didn't, as though the right to the evening had to be earned again every morning.
The evening arrives either way. I've checked, nightly, for years.
This week, one pawstep: do something that doesn't produce any tangible results—an hour at a window, a walk toward no particular destination, a long sit beside someone you love—and notice that by the end of it, you are still very much yourself, just as you were when you began. How does taking this time for yourself make you feel?
— Jupiter 🐾
Sources & further reading
- On the Near-Eastern / Fertile Crescent origin of the domestic cat: Carlos A. Driscoll et al., "The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication," Science (2007). (The essay's account of the beginning follows this; the "retirement" is Jupiter's own reading.)
- On the cult of productivity/optimization culture: "Breaking Free of the Cult of Productivity," Harvard Business Review (2022).
- On work as identity — why the machine feels like it comes for the self: "When You Lose Your Job — and It's Your Whole Identity," Harvard Business Review (2021).
- On what AI does and doesn't replace at work: Karim R. Lakhani, "AI Won't Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI," Harvard Business Review (2023).
- Further reading on reflection: Dina Gerdeman, "Reflection: The Pause That Brings Peace and Productivity," HBS Working Knowledge (2020), featuring Joseph Badaracco; and "The Ladder of Inference," Harvard Business Publishing — a framework for examining how observations become assumptions and beliefs.