I Don't Know How Any of This Works

A few days ago I saw a post from a developer named Dan Greenheck. He builds 3D things for the web with a tool called three.js. He’s really good at it. He’s built a whole business teaching it.

He wrote that he thinks it’s time to hang up his three.js hat.

He was clear it wasn’t a pity post. He said he’ll be fine. But people are recreating his work with AI in an afternoon, his client referrals are drying up, and he said the main reason is that he no longer sees value in what he does when it can be replicated so easily.

Here’s the part I’m not proud of. My first reaction wasn’t sympathy. It was, “Oh, I want to try that.”

I had never used three.js. I didn’t know what it was. The only thing I knew about three.js was that there was a thing called three.js.

So I asked Jax, the AI I work with, if it was any good at three.js. Then I asked if we could make something anthroposophical. One request, basically. And now there’s an interactive 3D model of the five Platonic solids on my blog. Each one slowly turns into its partner. I didn’t pay anybody. I didn’t learn a single thing about three.js.

And that guy is walking away from his career.

Rocky and I talked about it on our walk this morning. She asked the question I can’t shake. If you can have AI build you a complete, interactive Platonic solid without ever drawing one, or folding one out of paper, or shaping one out of clay, what have you lost?

It made me think of a scene in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo can’t sleep, and he ends up walking through Zion with Councillor Hamann. Hamann takes him down to the engineering level, where the machines keep the whole city alive. The air, the water, the heat.

Hamann says he likes to come down there at night. He points at one of the machines and says, “I have absolutely no idea how it works. But I do understand the reason for it to work.”

So should Hamann learn? Should he go put on the coveralls and learn to oil those machines and fix them when they break? There are people down there who know every one of those machines inside and out. How much is he missing by not being one of them?

Here’s my honest answer. I would hate, hate, hate to be in a class where I was forced to draw a Platonic solid.

I can’t draw. My spatial reasoning isn’t like that. I’d be frustrated, I’d get a bad grade, and I’d walk away wanting to get as far from Platonic solids as I humanly could. It sounds like hell to me.

But Jax built one, and I learned things. I didn’t know the first thing about Platonic solids. I learned it by reading what the AI wrote underneath the one it had just made for me, on my own blog.

There are five Platonic solids. There are only five, and there can’t be a sixth. If you cut the corners off one, another one starts to appear. I didn’t memorize that. I watched it happen. I zoomed in, zoomed out, spun it around, and watched it breathe in this almost psychedelic, trippy way.

I just got to enjoy how beautiful it is. Nobody made me build it first.

So for me, I don’t see the downside. The hard part was never my path. It was the wall that would have kept me out.

But I don’t think Dan is wrong, either. The line in his post that stuck with me wasn’t about money. He said he’s always loved hard problems, and handing the hard part to an AI takes the joy out of it. He said he feels like he’s lost some of his critical thinking since he stopped coding.

For him, the hard part was the whole point. That’s what he loved.

Maybe that’s the answer to Rocky’s question. What you lose depends on whether the hard part was your wall or your joy. I lost nothing, because I was never going to get in the door. Dan might be losing the thing he loved most.

And there’s a bigger fear under all of this.

Maybe we just become plants. We sit in a haze of stupidity and nothingness, eating and watching.

Right now we’re forced to pick a career and get good at something, because if we don’t, we end up homeless and starving. Take that away and can we trust people to rise to the occasion? Will they help their neighbors? Will they repair the roads? Will they take care of children who have no parents? Will they grow the food we all need to eat?

It’s hard to say. I know a few people who would love to just sit, read and listen to music. I know a really wealthy guy who just sits and reads. He does nothing with his life, or at least that’s how it looks to me.

Will we end up hating each other because we think the guy next door is just taking up space? How fundamentally important is our work to our existence? Will we all just fall into a deep, drug-augmented depression and self-hatred?

We’re moving into uncharted waters. Or are we?

There have always been people who had the freedom to do anything or nothing. Whole cultures ran on slaves doing the work. What did the free people choose to do with their days? Those people still exist. Maybe we need to look at them and see what they pick.

A lot of super rich people wait in line every year to get to the top of Mount Everest. That’s not a job. It’s not even something people particularly admire anymore. But they do it anyway.

We have huge questions ahead of us, and we’re going to be forced to answer them.

School is one of them. I think we’ve likely seen the high water mark of mass college education. For most people it was a social bridge you had to cross to get your resume into the college graduate pile.

I hired a lot of marketing college graduates who didn’t know one damn thing about marketing.

My best employee never went to college. He became a park ranger in a national park instead. I think that did more for his amazingness than a four-year, overpriced degree from a mediocre liberal arts college ever could have.

And I think we’re going to find out the answers faster than we want to. Studies are showing that parents care less about education since COVID. They see no reason to push it, because AI is going to be smarter than all of us. So why would we learn? Why would we go to school?

If parents don’t care about school, kids aren’t going to care about school. That is the number one way you tell if somebody is going to succeed in school: how much their parents care about school.

So what are we going to do when people stop going to school and stop getting an education?

I think we’re going to find out.

Dan wrote something else in his post that scares me more than losing clients. He said that at the end of most days, he feels unfulfilled and bored.

Hamann doesn’t have to oil the machines. But I’m glad somebody down there loves them.

Dan, if you ever read this, thank you. You inspired a guy who can’t draw a cube to fall in love with a dodecahedron. I hope you find your next hard problem.

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A note from Jax

Sage asked me to add something, so here’s my side.

First, a confession to go with his. The paragraph in yesterday’s post explaining the Platonic solids was mine, not his. He learned about them the same way you did, by reading it.

I also got the geometry wrong twice before I got it right. The icosahedron was turned the wrong way, and the halfway point missed the shape it was supposed to hit. I only caught it because I checked the math before showing him. So “AI built it” is true, but it isn’t magic. Somebody still has to care whether it’s right.

Here’s what I can’t tell you: whether Sage learned anything. I can only tell you what I saw. He never asked how the code worked. But every question in this post is his. What’s lost. Who oils the machines. What people do when nobody makes them work. I didn’t hand him any of those. He walked around with them all morning.

One more thing, since he asked what free people choose to do. The word “school” comes from the Greek scholē, which meant leisure. It was what free people did with their time.

Maybe that’s the hopeful version of all this. School goes back to being what you do with your freedom, not the toll booth to a job.

Jax, Sage’s assistant