AI models don’t have their own identity, experience, emotions, ambition, or beliefs. I often wonder if this is a problem as deep as consciousness. I believe we will give them all the "purpose" they will ever have, because AI has no purpose. You do.

There is plenty of emulation going on, of course: prompts, instructions, procedures, tools in never-ending loops, but we’re still the impetus for its motion. Like a deist’s clockmaker god, we create the agent’s world and its universe, wind it up, and let it go. But you, human, still wound it up.

The longer you think about this, the more it becomes apparent that lack of “purpose” is not a technical limitation; it’s something deeper. Something even humans struggle to describe, a question better answered by theology than technology.

I wonder if that will always be true, and increasingly I suspect it might be. Claude Code needs to be told what to build. You might argue soon it will do that part on its own, you just tell it to create a business and it’ll come up with the prompts. Yes, but you still gave it the goal.

Fine, you argue, soon models will have their own objectives. They won’t even need to be told; they’ll be trained to create businesses and medical breakthroughs all on their own. Probably not, but even if they did, who gave that loss function in training?

It’s not that agents can’t come up with good ideas, they have great ideas. It’s not that they don’t have the ability to execute those great ideas. They just never cared to try until you told them to.

If purpose, meaning, and ambition are non-transferable human values, then it is equally hopeful as it is concerning. There is hope that the things that animate us can never be truly replaced. The spark of creation in you that desires to create cannot be easily replicated or snuffed out.

Perhaps we are fractals: purpose-given creatures giving purpose to our creations. Leave it to us, though, to make it dystopian. Let’s try to avoid becoming matrix-style batteries of industrial-scale impetus.

Maybe the matrix was really about prompting at scale.

It’s clear the world is going to change incredibly rapidly. The next 10 years will see more change than the last 100, and yet, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Everything will change, but nothing will really change.

When your friend loses their job, when you’re faced with remaking your career, when you’re not sure how to advise your kids on their education, remember this truth: what makes them valuable and worthwhile was never their career. It was the spark.

As a Christian, I’m unshaken in my view of human worth: we are each valuable enough for Christ to die for us. But as an industry, if we won’t agree on those deep questions, how can we ever assume to do it in our own creations? No, I’m confident that the AI revolution will be as wonderful, and terrible, as we are.

My friends who know I’m deeply involved with AI often ask me what I see on the horizon, what advice do I have for them and their kids? So I’ll give you the same advice I give them: as we head into a hazy and uncertain future, I would strongly encourage all of you to have a purpose and ambition in life deeper than your career, and if you don’t know what that is, try church.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes: