Kevin Surace argues that work's real purpose isn't the task itself but the finished outcome. Before Excel, accountants thought their purpose was manual bookkeeping, when it was actually producing usable financial analysis. AI tools free workers from low-level tasks so they can focus on what actually matters.
And I've seen coders go, that was my sense of purpose. It's over. And I'm saying, no, no, no, you misinterpreted your sense of purpose. Your sense of purpose was to get a product out because the people on the other side don't actually care how you did it. They care that it came out and it meets their needs and has the features they want. And we think that our sense of purpose was to actually do line by line by line, like coding, writing music, or some other things. In finance, before Excel came out— this is an example I give all the time, right? Before Excel came out, everyone in finance had pencils and ledger books, and they thought that was their sense of purpose. No, the sense of purpose was getting the finances done so you could analyze them and do something with them, right? So all of these are tools that are accelerating our pace.
