My mum liked to tell me, when she was little, she imagined having a magic wand, that she could wave and get anything she wanted. Almost immediately she realized that life would become pointless.

I'm not really sure if that's true. For starters, having too much scarcity and adversity can also make life pointless. You just can't do anything you want. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

For me the most satisfying part of projects has always been overcoming difficulty. Although I had a slightly unpleasant version of that lately, where the difficulty turned out to be a hundred times worse than I anticipated, took years instead of weeks, and by the time I finished overcoming it, AI could make a better project than mine in a matter of minutes...

There's a story I always come back to in my mind, there was a story of a man in the mountains in India, who spent 20 years carving a passage through the mountain — by hand — so that his village would have easier access to the city and the hospital.

It's a very heroic story of course, but it would have been objectively better for all the people who needed the hospital, if he had just been given a bit of TNT instead.

the "utopia" where AI & robots will do everyone's jobs just sounds like hell to me. humans will adapt and find new challenges, either by finding things ai cannot do, or perhaps like a Butlerian Jihad...