About AI Anxiety

“Don’t honor the worthy, don’t prize rare goods, don’t dwell on what stirs desire.” But that “don’t” is not a way of avoiding the external world. It’s a shift of weight — from “external standards” back to “what I am actually doing.”

The antidote to anxiety is action

As soon as you start doing something concrete, your attention gets pulled back to the present, and the anxiety naturally recedes.

Don’t chase hype: one filter

Make a simple filter: does this thing have any direct relationship to what I’m doing?

Get to the bottom, don’t try to stay on top

It’s impossible to keep up with everything in this era. So switch strategies: go to the bottom.

A few concrete ways to do that:

• Read fewer overviews and more primary papers; overviews are what someone else has already chewed for you.
• When you hit a concept you don’t understand, dig one layer deeper. Don’t stop at the definition of “what is an agent” — chase it to “how is it different from a function call” and “in which scenarios does it work, and in which does it fail.”
• Go deep on two or three directions and give up “having it all.” You’re not a researcher; you don’t need to cover every branch.
• Apply what you learn to real projects. Knowledge you don’t use will evaporate.

What human ability can AI not replace?

Quality

What is quality? In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig offers a definition. He argues that quality belongs to neither the subjective nor the objective realm. Here “subjective” refers to the mind, and “objective” refers to matter. Quality is the event itself that happens when subject and object meet.

It’s like when you hear a piece of music, and before you’ve had a chance to analyze its chords or melody, you’re already moved. That moment of being moved is quality. When designing a product, before we’ve carefully laid out its design principles and boundaries, we already know this thing is right. That sense of “right” is conscience. When we read a passage and feel its power before analyzing it, that power is quality.

Pirsig calls quality “the knowledge of experience.” The knife-edge of experience exists only in the present, only in that instant of contact between subject and object.

The speed of recognizing quality is always faster than the speed of explaining it.

Dynamic quality and static quality

Dynamic quality is indefinable and cannot be fixed. It’s the immediate “yes right, not right” we feel in the present.

Static quality, on the other hand, is dynamic conscience that has been experienced and solidified into rules, standards, definitions, and frameworks — the best practices.

AI is the largest quality processor

AI right now represents the largest quality processor in human history. It masters every defined static pattern — definitions, frameworks, best practices, and so on. But AI can only operate after quality has been defined; it cannot reach the source where quality is generated.

So we need to learn to judge problems, break down tasks, build processes, and develop taste. Put AI into our real work.

The opposite of anxiety is not optimism; it’s action.

And the end point of technology is not showing off skill; it’s doing things more clearly and living more seriously.