This is a piece I originally posted to my Instagram story in January 2026.

I recently watched a documentary about how the world of Go has changed since the arrival of AI. Go was one of the very first fields to be hit by the great wave of AI. What caught my interest most was the disappearance of personal playing style and the rise of the “AI match rate.” In Go today, what decides your win rate is no longer how original and distinctive your moves are, but how closely they match the answer the AI would give.

Watching this shift, I suddenly found myself wondering what would happen to other fields. What about the field I work in myself, software development?

Development has something a bit like “style” too. Imperative programming, functional programming, all the various design patterns, things like that.

But once AI offers up a single optimal solution, all of these styles will be swept away, leaving only that one optimal answer. After all, the goal of development isn’t diversity.

So… what won’t be replaced by AI?

There are domains where I think style will be permitted forever. The prime example is art. Art has no fixed optimal solution. Some people love hyperrealist painting; others love abstract work. Some people love jazz; others love rock. There’s no ranking one above the other.

And it isn’t just art. Sports, cooking, empathy, values, and even politics are all places where style is allowed. It’s hard to hold any of these up against a yardstick called optimization.

Maybe, paradoxically, the deeper we get into the age of AI, the more the most human values will matter. Things that can’t be measured by efficiency, like values, love, and empathy. Isn’t the place we finally arrive at, at the end of the age of efficiency, our own humanity?

So… let’s live like humans, you and I.