The Commodification of Everything
Last night, I sat at my desk watching an AI paint. Well, it was just predicting after all. In a couple of seconds, it had finished a landscape that would have taken me hours. The mountains were perfect. The clouds caught the light just so. And yet—something was missing. The process. The hesitation. The thousand tiny decisions that make art human.
Lately, I’ve been wondering about value, not in the transactional sense but in what lives between effort and outcome, between skill and expression. It’s the kind of value that’s difficult to define in a world where creating can be as quick as pressing a button.
Think back to when making things demanded time. When a film was months of footage sifted down to a single narrative. When an illustration was hundreds of sketches scattered across the studio floor. When a sentence meant hours spent staring at a blank page until meaning took form. Those days haven’t vanished entirely. They’re just transforming, moving into something faster and perhaps less familiar.
Beyond the Canvas
It’s not just in art. Take a developer starting out today, hands moving over a keyboard, with AI suggesting lines of code before they’re even typed. It’s like having a senior engineer beside you, anticipating every function, each snippet of logic. Google’s AI now writes 25% of its code. This isn’t futuristic; it’s here, surprising yet somehow inevitable.
These tools aren’t flawless; they stumble, they misjudge. But they’re becoming sharper, faster, and they’re prompting questions we aren’t quite ready to answer: What happens when mastery becomes a commodity? When a skill honed over years becomes available instantly, downloaded in seconds?
But there’s something we can’t seem to let go. I noticed it at a market last weekend, watching a potter work clay. People gathered around the wheel, entranced by the process, not by the product. No one was asking about efficiency or saving time; they were absorbed by the dance between hands and material, vision and touch.
You see it in coding too, in those moments when a line of code just fits because it’s been understood, not just generated. It’s in designs that move beyond form to function as if speaking directly to their user. It’s in that rare instant when technology fades, leaving only intention.
Towards a Different Purpose
Maybe this is where we’re heading: a future where AI manages the routine and leaves us room to pursue what lies beyond the reach of automation. Where technology handles the scaffolding, and we concentrate on what makes us curious, what drives imagination. In this space, value won’t come from scarcity alone but from something more intangible.
Today's children will draw with algorithms as naturally as we drew with crayons. They don't see shortcuts or cheating—they see endless canvases. Every tool that turns thought into form is simply part of their creative vocabulary, as ordinary as picking up a pencil. Their imagination runs ahead of any technical barrier, free in a way we're only beginning to understand. They create not from what they can already do, but from what they can dream up. And there's something beautiful in that freedom—raw creativity untethered from the long apprenticeship of skill.
We’re all learning to measure differently now, to see value not just in time spent or skill acquired but in authentic moments, in ideas that reflect the person behind them. When making becomes easy, we’ll need to find new ways to connect, new markers of worth. Perhaps that’s what this transformation is really about: a shift in how we understand what’s valuable.
A Future Worth Pursuing
Understanding lives in the space between thinking and doing. It's there in the weight of each choice, in those moments when something feels not quite right. These aren't steps in a manual—they're a kind of knowing that comes from time spent with the work.
AI moves like lightning through this space. Clean. Precise. Perfect, even. But perfection isn't the same as rightness. It can generate a thousand solutions, each one gleaming like new coins, each one missing something we recognize but can't name.
Here's the twist: as creation gets easier, the value shifts. It moves from the making to the knowing—knowing which path to take, which details matter, which moments need to breathe. AI can light the way, can carry the load, but the final step from good to true? That's still ours to take.
By Daniel Huszár