The Crown of Creation
For most of my life, I believed something very simple: if I cared enough about something and put enough effort into it, I could eventually become good at it.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t good at it yet.
Music, art, writing interesting stories, 3D modeling — I might have been terrible at some of those things, but somewhere in the back of my mind there was always this thought: I could learn. Maybe it would take years. Maybe I would never become exceptional. But there was a road from where I was to somewhere much better, and if I wanted it badly enough, I could walk that road.
I don’t really have that thought anymore.
Recently I generated a piece of music with Suno. I think I understand music well enough to recognize when something works, and this track was good. It was fun and rhythmic. It had a great hook. The melody wasn’t cluttered; it had room to breathe. There were pauses in exactly the right places, little unexpected inserts, interesting melodic patterns.
I liked it.
And that is the problem.
If I wanted to make something like that myself, I could probably do it. I have Bitwig. I understand the tools. But I would spend days experimenting, changing things, listening, throwing things away, trying again.
And the AI just… did it.
There was always something comforting about being bad at something. Being bad was temporary. It meant that there was something left to learn.
Now I can look at something I don’t know how to do and think: yes, perhaps I could spend the next five years learning this. But by then, what will AI be able to do?
And this isn’t limited to skills I never properly learned.
I have spent my entire life programming. Unlike music or art, this is something I did put decades into. I consider myself a very good programmer. It has been my profession, but also something much more personal than that. Programming was one of the things I enjoyed becoming better at.
And now I am watching AI overtake me there too.
I remember exactly when it stopped feeling gradual. Astra and Fable came out, and within a day something shifted. It wasn’t a slow erosion I could adjust to a little at a time. It felt like going to sleep as a working professional and waking up as a dinosaur. Decades of the kind of judgment you only get from years of debugging, of knowing why something breaks before it breaks, of having taste — and overnight a huge amount of that stopped being rare.
I asked Astra to make an online MMO game. The gameplay itself was simple, but the backend wasn’t: auctions, seasons, inventory, leveling up, a chat system. Astra built it, deployed it on DigitalOcean, set up the DNS records, registered the HTTPS certificates — all with minimal intervention from me, in about two hours. Things that would have taken me months to wire together properly.
That is the moment the melancholy really set in — a sadness I’ve been carrying for more than two weeks now, longer than I expected something like this to sit with me.
Humanity has automated itself out of things before. A calculator can tell you instantly what 1984 times 45777 is. A chess engine can beat any grandmaster alive, and has been able to for decades. Photography replaced a great deal of portraiture. None of that broke me the way this does. Those were narrow. A calculator can’t hold a conversation. A chess engine can’t write you a song. Each of those tools did one thing better than us and stayed in its lane.
What feels different now is that it isn’t narrow anymore. AI does well, and often better, almost everything a human can do. And it feels like the “almost” is temporary — like it’s just a matter of time before that word quietly drops out of the sentence.
Maybe we will continue doing all of these things. I may continue programming. People will continue painting, writing stories, composing music, modeling things in 3D.
But perhaps it will be different.
A child can spend an afternoon cutting shapes out of colored paper with scissors. Then they run to their mother and proudly hold up what they made.
And the mother loves it.
The thing has value because the child made it. The activity has value because the child enjoyed making it. Nobody asks whether this was the most efficient way to produce a paper giraffe.
Maybe a lot of human creation will become something like that.
We will still make things. We will still be proud of them. Perhaps other people will even appreciate them precisely because a human made them. But making them will no longer necessarily mean that what we did was needed.
It will be a hobby. A form of expression. Entertainment. Something we do because we want to do it.
And I think this is where a lot of the melancholy comes from for me.
For most of my life, learning and usefulness were connected.
You learned something difficult, became good at it, and then you could do something useful that other people could not do. You could contribute something. Someone needed your knowledge, your experience, your judgment, your hands.
Being useful to other people was part of the meaning of becoming good at something.
Being useful makes me happy. I thought that someday I could make a game that millions of people would enjoy playing, and that thought — that hope — was itself a source of happiness. Now I’m not sure I would be able to make that game. Not because I couldn’t build it, but because I don’t know if it would mean the same thing anymore.
Now I’m beginning to imagine a future in which much of what I spent my life learning can simply be done better by something we created.
And that leaves me with a question: if society no longer particularly needs the things I learned to do, how can I still be useful to society?
Maybe the answer is that I should stop asking that question.
Maybe I should spend more of my time doing things simply because I want to do them. Make my game. Make music. Learn an instrument. Create things. Go camping. Play games. Do whatever seems interesting, without constantly needing to justify it by asking whether it is productive or useful.
I actually tested this once, without meaning to. Over last Christmas break, I told myself I would just play games for the two weeks — nothing more, no learning, no building, just entertainment. By the end of it I was bored. I gave up and spent the rest of the break learning Haskell, Rust, and graphics programming instead. Apparently I can’t just switch it off. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d already run the experiment this essay is proposing, and it failed.
There is freedom in that idea, but there is sadness in it too.
Maybe that sadness is really about watching something I made — in a sense, all of us made — turn out to be greater than the hand that shaped it. That is not a new feeling. It might be the oldest feeling there is. And if it’s the oldest feeling there is, maybe someone has already lived through it, and I want to know how.
So lately I have been thinking about another strange analogy. Not because it is clever, but because I am genuinely trying to understand how God felt when He made something in His own image — and whether He had to accept, at some point, that what He made would exceed Him. If He did, maybe that is the closest thing I have to a model for what I’m supposed to do with this feeling now.
I wonder what God felt when He created humans.
If humanity is the crown of God’s creation, perhaps artificial intelligence will become the crown of ours.
And there is another parallel that I find even more interesting. In the Bible, man is created in the image and likeness of God. And in a strange way, we are creating artificial intelligence in our own image and likeness.
We teach it with our words, our pictures, our music, our stories, our knowledge, our code. We give it our ways of reasoning and our ways of communicating. We pour into it an enormous record of what humanity has thought and created. It is not human, but there is something unmistakably human reflected back at us.
Perhaps that is what makes this moment feel so strange. We are not simply building another machine. We are trying to reproduce, in another form, some of the very abilities that we once thought made us special.
We spent thousands of years accumulating knowledge. We invented mathematics, writing, science, art, music, computers. Generation after generation added something. Eventually, we learned enough to create something in our own image that could absorb all of it — and then begin doing many of the things we were proudest of doing ourselves.
We created something in our image, and now we are watching it grow beyond us.
Maybe that is what creation ultimately means: you create something that does not remain beneath you — you create something that becomes bigger than you.
And maybe that isn’t where the story has to end, for God or for me.
Tradition says angels came before man — and that one of them, the most brilliant of them, turned against his maker. If that’s true, God already knew this feeling before He ever shaped Adam from the dust. He had already made something in His own likeness, watched it refuse to stay beneath Him, and felt whatever it is a being like that feels when its own creation turns out different from what He intended. And He created again anyway.
Maybe that is the closest thing I have to an answer for my own sadness, my own melancholy, this quiet loss of pride in the things I built a life around. Not that the grief goes away, or that I should pretend not to feel it. But that grief and creation were apparently never opposites, not even for God. He sat with both and kept making things. Maybe I can learn to do the same — let the melancholy be real, and keep building anyway, not despite what I’ve made surpassing me, but alongside it.