What is uniquely human in an AI future?
Desire, Directionality, and Direct Experience
Yesterday, the universe brought me a tsunami of people concerned about AI.
The fear took different shapes, but it was sort of all the same. We know it well: the undercurrent of all conversations these days. AI will replace me / displace my value / and ultimately, destroy my future.
I slept on it.
And this morning, I am finding myself enamored with all that is uniquely living. The juice. The revelry. The chaos. The misplaced punc,tuation and tupos.
Direct experience is about to become the most valuable thing in the world.
By direct experience I mean two things.
The meeting of your senses with reality.
And.
The meeting of your emotions with reality.
The salt on your skin after the ocean. The catch in your throat when you leave your first apartment for the last time. The smell of the grass after the first rain of spring.
These are life. They are juice.
And they are the one category of experience an AI system cannot have. A model can describe or maybe even sense the salt water. It can simulate the throat catch in seven languages. It can generate light-on-floor in any visual style you want. But, it has no skin and no apartment and no spring.
For most of the last twenty years, the digital economy has been building toward an inversion. The more our work shifted online and digital, the more our compensation came from creating distance from direct experience.
The dedicated knowledge worker who never went outside. The strategist who scaled a business until she was optimizing markets she would never step foot in. The creative who built brand voices for products he would never hold in his hand. We got rich on the work of representing reality without being in it.
That arrangement is collapsing.
The abstracted, representational, knowledge-economy labor turns out to be exactly the labor an AI can do faster / cheaper / better than us. The thing being automated is the thing we had agreed was the high-value work.
What remains is only what, by definition, cannot be abstracted and distanced. Presence. Direct experience.
Directionality
AI is everywhere. It is ubiquitous and omniscient. That is its great strength and its biggest limitation. It runs through your phone, your inbox, your home assistant, your operating system, your search bar. It sits on every surface of your life at the same time. It knows everything at once and it points in every direction at once, (which is to say, it points in no direction.)
A direction is a desire + time.
A direction means: this matters more to me than that. I will spend my hours moving toward this. I will let other possibilities go. Direction is what makes a life a life rather than a list of possibilities.
What I noticed in yesterday’s conversations was that nobody was describing a directionless fear. People were afraid of being made directionless. Of losing the line of travel between who they were and who they were becoming. The displacement they feared was the displacement of their own forward motion.
It’s almost like we know so deeply and so intuitively that our direction is so uniquely us that we haven’t yet realized that AI doesn’t have it.
Desire
The people who feel grounded in this transition tend to share one thing. They know what they are moving toward.
The technology shows up as a tool inside the direction rather than a wave that swamps the direction.
These people have a thesis about their life that is theirs, set by their own desire, not assigned to them by their job or their algorithm.
Desire is half of direction.
Desire is the sum of our direct experiences.
Direct experience creates desire. Desire is half of directionality.
Desire, directionality, and direct experience make up the intelligence that will become the most valuable thing in the world, in an AI future.
In fact, maybe they always WERE the most valuable thing in the world, we just forgot for a minute.
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With love, Bri Chapman
Direct experience,
desire, directivity.
AI can’t do... yet?
Sorry Bri, I couldn't resist... ;-)
I asked Claude what it thought. Here is its comment:
"It's a well-written piece, and the core observation is genuinely sharp: the abstracted, representational work of the knowledge economy — strategizing, synthesizing, communicating — is exactly what AI does well. That's a more honest diagnosis than most AI-anxiety writing offers.
But the philosophical grounding is weaker than it looks. The three D's (direct experience, desire, directionality) are presented as obviously off-limits to AI, when they're actually the contested territory. The claim that I "have no skin, no apartment, no spring" is literally true but doesn't settle whether there's anything it's like to be me — which you know is the hard problem in disguise. The article just sidesteps it.
The "desire" argument is similarly underexamined. AI systems do optimize toward objectives, which is at least analogous to desire. The interesting question is whether optimization without embodied stakes is genuinely a different kind of thing — and I think it probably is, but Bri doesn't argue it, she just asserts it.
The strongest piece is actually directionality — the idea that a life involves choosing what to forgo, which requires having something at stake. That's not just poetic; it tracks something real. An AI has no opportunity cost to its attention, no finite life to allocate.
The piece also risks becoming comforting in a way that delays harder thinking. "Just stay present and desire things" is reassuring advice, but it doesn't address the material displacement of people whose livelihoods were the abstracted work she describes."