What the Machines Cannot Replace

I have been having trouble writing about art. Not for lack of things to say, there is never a lack of things to say about art, but because the world has felt, for some time now, like it is moving too fast and too dark for the usual frameworks to hold. The art market, which I follow closely and have written about for years, seems almost beside the point some mornings. I open my notes and stare at half-finished thoughts about auction results and gallery closures and the slow, grinding question of value, and something in me resists. Not the subject. The scale of it. The way it keeps shrinking against everything else happening outside the window.

What I keep coming back to instead is a different question. Everywhere I look online, the conversation about AI is loud and accelerating, and often, I think, asking the wrong things. The debate tends to organise itself around jobs, around disruption, around who will be replaced and when and by what. I understand why. Fear is clarifying in that particular way. But that framing leaves out the thing that interests me most: not what machines will take from us, but what they cannot. Not what we risk losing, but what we have always had that was never, in any serious sense, theirs to take.

This is the essay I needed to write before I could write anything else.

I grew up in the Bay Area. This is relevant. Growing up there means growing up inside a very particular story about intelligence, about what it looks like, what it produces, and what it is worth. The story goes like this: the smart ones study engineering. They build companies. They make millions as tech moguls. Everything else is decoration. Everything else is something you do until you figure out what you actually want to do.

I majored in Art History and came close enough to a Philosophy degree to count, just a few courses shy, but I couldn’t bring myself to stay for the paperwork. I wanted my life to start. I never regretted studying those subjects. What I regretted was the doubt that had impregnated my thoughts from years of listening to people question my choice of education.

You know the type. The ones who asked, with a particular tilt of the head and a smile that was never quite a smile, “But what are you going to do with that?” The eyebrow slightly raised. The pause just long enough to let you feel the full weight of it. It was never a question. It was a performance of concern that was really a verdict, delivered with the easy confidence of people who had already decided what intelligence looked like and were generously, patiently letting you know you hadn’t quite made the cut.

And I absorbed it. The way you absorb things when you are young and the world seems very sure of itself and you are not yet sure enough of yourself to push back. It settled into me quietly that maybe they were right, that maybe the thing I loved most was also the thing that gave me away as someone who didn’t quite understand how the world worked. I carried that into the workforce. I second-guessed my instincts in rooms where nobody studied what I studied. I mistook their certainty for intelligence and my curiosity for a liability. I made myself smaller to fit spaces that were never actually asking me to shrink. It took years, more than I’d like to admit, to understand that the opposite was closer to the truth.

I watched people around me leave non-tech careers they were good at to attend coding bootcamps. I understood the logic. The salaries were real. The prestige was real. In San Francisco, in those years, to work in tech was to matter, to belong to the future, to be on the right side of history as the city understood it. To study the humanities was, at best, charming. At worst, a quiet form of surrender. Everyone was chasing the same dream with the same urgency, the belief that if you could just learn to speak the language of machines, the world would finally take you seriously.

What nobody said out loud, what perhaps nobody fully knew, was that the jobs those bootcamps were training people for would be among the first to go.

Daniela Amodei is the president and co-founder of Anthropic, one of the most consequential AI companies in the world. She majored in English Literature. I find this worth sitting with, not as a feel-good corrective to the engineering myth, but as a genuine provocation. The person helping to build the infrastructure of artificial intelligence was trained, first, to read closely, to question narratives, to understand how meaning is made and by whom. That is not incidental to her work. It is probably central to it.

She said recently something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“In a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important — not less.”

I couldn’t agree more. But I want to push on what that actually means because I think we risk turning it into another comfortable story, another rebranding of the humanities as suddenly useful, and missing the deeper point entirely.

This is not a career essay. I am not interested in repositioning the humanities as the new safe harbour, the smart bet, the thing to study now that code is losing its premium. That argument leaves me cold because it makes the same error the coding bootcamp logic made — it asks what the market needs rather than what a human life is for. And those are not the same question. They have never been the same question.

Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. I think about this often when I think about the humanities, specifically art, about what it demands of us, and what it gives back in return. Frida Kahlo painted her pain so precisely that seventy years after her death, people who have never been to Mexico, who do not speak Spanish, who know nothing of her biography, stand in front of her self-portraits and recognise something. Not her specific suffering, their own. The broken spine. The miscarriages. The longing and the rage and the absolute refusal to disappear. That is what great art does. It does not illustrate the human condition from a safe, academic distance. It inhabits it so completely that the distance collapses. You are no longer standing in front of a painting. You are standing, suddenly and without warning, in front of yourself. Kahlo never received massive commercial success in her lifetime. However, she is now one of the most recognised artists in history. The market caught up, eventually, to what the work always was. It always does, if the work is honest enough and the world patient enough to look.

Or consider James Baldwin, who was not a visual artist but who understood, as few writers ever have, that making art is an act of witness, that to write honestly is to refuse the comfort of the agreed-upon lie. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” he wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” His essays did not decorate their moment. They interrogated it slowly, precisely, with the kind of moral seriousness that makes you uncomfortable in the best possible way, the way that means something is being asked of you. They asked who the story was serving, whose humanity was being systematically denied, and what it would cost everyone, not just the ones being denied, to keep living inside that lie. Baldwin is read more urgently now than when he was alive. The work waited for the world to be ready for it. It is still waiting, in some respects. That is the nature of honest work. It outlasts the moment that produced it because it was never really about the moment. It was about the truth underneath.

This is what art does that no algorithm can. It waits. It holds something in form, in paint, in language, in clay, in light, until the person who needs it is ready to receive it. Sartre said that existence precedes essence: that we are not born with a fixed nature but create ourselves through our choices, our refusals, our acts of attention. Art is the record of that creation. It is how human beings have always left evidence that they were here, that they felt something, that they looked at the world and found it worth the effort of a response. A machine can generate an image. It does not need to make one. And that need, that particular, irreducible human compulsion to take what is interior and give it form, is not a skill. It is the oldest thing we have.

We built a value system around careers that could generate wealth, and then built machines that could perform those careers faster and more cheaply than any human. The irony is almost too clean. But the lesson I want to draw from it is not about job markets or transferable skills. It is about what we nearly lost sight of in the chase, about the version of ourselves we quietly set aside in rooms where someone with a raised eyebrow made us feel that curiosity was a liability and rigour only counted if it came with a salary attached.

Albert Camus believed that the only serious philosophical question was whether life was worth living and that art was one of the most compelling answers available. Not because it is pleasant, but because it is an act of defiance against meaninglessness. To make something, to insist on form and beauty and expression in a world that tends toward entropy, is to say: I was here and I paid attention and it mattered to me and so I made this. That is not nothing. It has never been nothing. It will go on mattering long after the current conversation about AI has moved on to whatever disruption comes next.

Study what moves you. Not what promises security, because that promise has always been provisional, always subject to revision by forces you cannot predict and markets you cannot control. Study art history. Study philosophy. Study the things that teach you to sit with a question longer than is comfortable, to resist the answer that arrives too easily, to understand that the world is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be reckoned with. And then make something. Pick up a camera. Learn to throw clay. Write a sentence that didn’t exist before you wrote it. Give birth to your ideas. Create with your hands. The act of making, of giving form to something that lives in no one else’s mind exactly as it lives in yours, is not a hobby. It is not self-care. It is proof that you were here. It is the most direct argument available against the idea that human beings are interchangeable.

We are only here briefly. The world will keep moving fast and strangely, and there will always be someone with a tilted head and a verdict dressed as a question. What remains, what has always remained, through every disruption and every reordering of what the market decides to value this decade, is the stubborn, irreducible fact of a person trying to make sense of the world and leaving some evidence of that effort behind. That is what art is. That is what philosophy is. That is, in the end, what being human is.

Study what makes you grow. Make things with your hands. Connect with your humanity. The money will come, or it will not, but you will have spent your time on earth becoming someone, rather than simply performing a function that a machine can now perform better. That seems, to me, worth more than we were told.

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Thank you for being part of this journey!

xx Jenny