The Quiet Theft of Purpose

"Independence + Purpose = Happiness" Morgan Housel Morgan Housel has a tidy little formula for a good life. Independence means controlling your own time. Purpose means having a reason to get out of bed that someone else did not assign to you under threat of termination. It is a lovely recipe. Two ingredients. Hard to mess up. Enter artificial intelligence, holding a knife in each hand, asking very politely whether it can help with the chopping. The pitch, and the catchThe promise of AI is seductive precisely because it sounds like it is handing you both ingredients on a silver tray. It will do your boring tasks, so you get your time back. That is independence. It will free you to do the meaningful work only a human can do. That is purpose. You will be a strategist, a visionary, a person who sips coffee while the robots toil. The catch is small and distant, the way a trapdoor is small and distant until you are standing on it. For a great many people, the boring task and the meaningful…