The Monkey on the Garbage Truck.

I was driving, a few hundred feet from the bridge, when a garbage truck passed me, and on that garbage truck there was a stuffed animal monkey with a big smile, taped or somehow stuck onto the front. He was super puffy, super joyous, and that made my day.

The little details on this earth are a big part of what makes this planet so special. The intricacies in every human are another. The intricacies in every animal.

I think the little whimsical customizations that humans make are so special, especially in the age of AI, where everything can seem super generic and monotonous. Everyone notices the repetitiveness and the dullness of AI "creativity," and yet many people say that AI is going to completely replace humans.

There's no doubt that AI is absolutely incredible at a ton of skills, and even better than some of the great humans at what they do. Coding, for instance. I've noticed this firsthand in developing aquaedge.co, the AI tutor that actually makes you think. When I started, I would really have to beg it to do what I wanted. Having a fundamental understanding of what I'm coding, and the structures that I'm coding in, helped me, and even today, they'll still help you, because of course, the response is only as good as the prompt. I would get a lot of weird code, a lot of hacks instead of true fixes, but today, with the most powerful AI models, the output is as good as clean code from a professional engineer. And that's amazing, because it allows so many more people to create. English is the new coding language. Everyone can build things.

Now, does this mean that there's going to be a lot more slop? Absolutely. And we've seen it firsthand, all of us, collectively. But some of the slop is entertaining. It's comical. But some of us are sitting here thinking - when is this going to stop? We're tired of seeing these AI figures in these brain rot videos. And so every once in a while, there's a creative video, and I'm not saying that the peak of human creativity is an AI-generated video, but we can see the creativity of the human who prompted it. You're sitting there thinking, what could have been the prompt to make this video? It's hilarious. And they were able to bring their vision to life.

So many other people are able to bring their vision to life with the power of AI, but they're capped only by their own personal creativity and their ability to articulate their thoughts. That's why I think being a great writer is one of the most leveraged skills today.

But to say that AI is replacing or satisfying many of the human tasks that we used to have to do - it's not an untrue statement. It's true. AI is handling so much more data than the best data scientists could. And absolutely, some careers are at risk, and there's going to be a transition period where we acclimate. There are so many jobs that AI could never fully replace, because they require human input. For instance, teachers. There's a lot of AI that can be introduced into education, but in-person education will never truly be replaced because there's a human connection. Same with therapists.

Humans might be out of the loop for many things that we had to do in the past, but many of these things were things that no one wanted to do. Maybe that's what made the career valuable. But now it's a commodity, like many types of software engineering.

But design isn't a commodity. Sure, you can put design prompting into a skill MD file - telling the AI how to format and build things - but who's making the skill MD file? We are the ones giving AI the design. AI can only reproduce what's in its training set or what we give it. So if AIs are just feeding off each other in the same loop, there's no new creativity getting fed in.

And that's the sort of thing that humans can do, that the AI can't quite replicate - that true creativity. Of course, we are influenced by the environment and the things around us. But are the things that we create, design, and build direct results of our environment? Not quite. There's a sort of intervention in our mind, a knowledge that we all can use to create new things. Whereas AI is amazing at replicating things - amazing code, good solutions in code. But that last bit of human creativity is something that I'm confident AI won't fully replicate.

AI isn't going to put stuffed animal monkeys on the front of garbage trucks. AI isn't going to draw the silly drawings little kids draw.

You might think, "oh, great, AI's not going to replicate the little kid's drawing." Or, "well, with image generation, it probably could."

Just because AI can replicate something convincingly human - even beautifully human, or at least with a mask of humanity on it - doesn't mean it would ever truly be human.