I know this is going to sound a bit off at first, but if you actually think about how people decide what matters to them, you see how fragile those rules are when something big shows up. I am talking about AI in the way most people are not even prepared for, and it is not just how jobs will get automated or if we will have new tech toys to play with, but the basics of what we think is worth respecting, trusting and spending time on.
There is a big assumption everywhere that value systems come from tradition or what parents or school teach you, but in reality, you start shifting your priorities when the world you wake up in no longer rewards the same things as before.
That is already happening.
If a person can use an AI to solve a math problem in one second, and another person spends all night figuring it out, most people will still want to pat the one who did it the old way on the back, but that is just for now.
You see it in the schools.
Teachers are trying to defend old grading systems or teaching styles, but students already figured out that it is faster and easier to get the answer somewhere else. That does not mean they are lazier, it just means the rules of what counts as “hard work” or “original thinking” do not match the reality anymore. If the point is to get the right answer, AI is better. If the point is to know how you got there, then the whole process starts to feel pointless when nobody else cares.
The same goes for jobs where you used to be respected for knowing obscure information or doing something complicated in Excel.
Now it is just a prompt away.
Family, status, what makes you a “good” person, what is worth paying for, what you even bother remembering, every single one of those starts shifting as soon as the way we measure value changes. You cannot keep saying, “work hard, memorize, grind” if the people who do not do any of that are getting ahead faster, and nobody really cares how you got there only that you got the result.
I am not saying this as a complaint, I just see that most adults around me are pretending nothing has changed, but you know it has. You are already measuring trust, skill, and even friendship in different ways now.
If you have an AI friend who texts you, is that real? What if you rely on AI to write your apology or your job application, does that mean you are less honest or just more efficient?
The old answers do not fit, so the value system bends. I believe that in the next years, you will see less reward for effort and more reward for knowing how to use the tools even if you barely did any of it yourself.
You can call that unfair, but it does not matter if the rest of the world shifts.
This is what it feels like to watch values change right in front of you, not from a book but in the way everyone acts and what gets rewarded.
I do not know if that is progress, but it is what it is.
Credit:
My thumbnail image was generated using Chatgpt 4.1 model.