Crafted, Not Subjected

Most of what passes for “AI optimism” is a forecast wearing a smile. The future arrives, it’s wonderful, we’re along for the ride. That isn’t optimism. It’s the doomer’s posture with the sign flipped. Both camps agree on the part that matters: the future is something that happens to us. They only disagree about whether to brace or to cheer.

I don’t buy either one. Not because I know how this goes, I don’t, and the people who say they do are selling something, but because the question that decides anything isn’t what will AI do to us. It’s what will we do with it. And that question only has an answer if we insist on having one.

So, plainly: I choose to be optimistic that we can craft our future rather than be subjected to it.

The load-bearing word is choose. This isn’t a prediction, it’s a stance. I’m not claiming the good version is likely. I’m claiming that the belief we’re subject to the future is the one belief that guarantees it, because the moment you accept you’re a passenger, you stop steering, and then you really are just cargo.

I have a specific vantage on this, and it’s worth saying where it comes from, not as a credential but because it’s the data I actually have. I build software, mostly alone now, leaning on AI for work I used to hire for. The timelines have collapsed in ways that still catch me off guard. And the moment I keep waiting for, the one where the tools make me redundant, hasn’t come. What happened instead is more interesting: the part of the work that’s irreducibly mine got more important, not less.

When building gets cheap, building stops being the scarce thing. Judgment becomes scarce. Taste. Knowing what’s worth making, which corner to cut and which to defend, when the obvious answer is wrong. AI hands you a thousand competent options. It won’t tell you which one matters. That’s still yours. It’s more yours, because the bottleneck moved from the doing to the choosing. There’s early data underneath this, not just vibes. Economists at the Dallas Fed, reviewing wages through early 2026, found that across most AI-exposed work the technology is so far augmenting people rather than replacing them. The human didn’t leave the loop. The human got moved to the part of the loop that was always the point.

That’s the honest root of my optimism. And here’s where I have to be just as honest, because the same vantage shows me the other thing.

The technology that made me, a senior, already leveraged, more valuable is the same technology sitting under a roughly 20% drop in employment for the youngest software developers, the 22-to-25-year-olds, measured against their late-2022 peak. Same field. Same tools. Opposite ends of the ladder. The rung I climbed to get here is the rung being quietly sawn off. When I say we can craft the future, I have to sit with how much weight that word is carrying, because for a lot of people, AI isn’t a tool in their hands at all. It’s a decision made about them, somewhere else.

And the somewhere-else is consolidating fast. For most of a decade, AI was pitched as a public utility, cheap, neutral, always available. In 2026 it started behaving more like a lever: earlier this year a government switched off a frontier model across the entire world in about ninety minutes. Compute, capital, distribution, the model weights themselves, the control points are pooling into a handful of hands that can grant access or pull it. “We can craft our future” runs straight into the question of who’s holding the chisel.

So I’m not going to file this down into a lesson, because it doesn’t have one. The version where this mostly happens to people is fully on the table, and pretending otherwise would be the smiling forecast I opened by rejecting.

What I’ll say is narrower, and I think truer for it. The macro numbers don’t actually show mass displacement yet. The Yale Budget Lab went looking in early 2026 and found no clear signal in the aggregate. Which means the thing isn’t settled. It’s still forming. And the future where it happens to us becomes certain only at the moment enough of us decide it’s inevitable and stop trying to author the alternative. Surrender is the one move that can’t be walked back. Everything else is still being decided, by who builds, who gets the tools into their hands, who insists the we gets wider instead of narrower. That isn’t a forecast. It’s work, and it only gets done by people who think it’s worth doing.

The future isn’t owed to us in either direction. It won’t be the catastrophe the doomers sell or the gift the boosters promise. It’ll be whatever we’re willing to make, by the specific people willing to make it. Given the choice between bracing for that and building into it, I know which one I’d rather spend the uncertainty on.

So I choose optimism. Not as a belief about how it ends. As a decision about how I’m going to act while it’s still up for grabs.