We Were Never the Center

For most of history, we assumed we were the center of everything. AI is the latest thing to tell us otherwise, and this time it is something we built ourselves. I work with it every day, and I want to understand why that still feels uncomfortable for so many of us, sometimes including me.

The spaghetti test

In March 2023, someone posted a short AI video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. It was terrible. His face melted from frame to frame, the fork went places forks don’t go, and the internet had a good laugh. The clip turned into a running joke and later into an informal benchmark for AI video. About two years later, Google’s video model made a version that most people would not immediately recognize as fake. The only giveaway was the sound: the spaghetti crunched^[1]. That was in May 2025. Today, even that version looks dated.

I keep coming back to this clip because it shows a pattern I have seen again and again. Someone points out what AI can’t do. They are usually right, at least the ones who really know the field. And then the gap closes, faster than anyone expected. AI can’t write secure code. AI makes things up. AI will never do this or that. Each of these sentences was true when it was said, and each seems to have a shorter shelf life than the one before.

We have been here before

The interesting question to me is not whether AI will close the next gap. It’s why we are surprised every single time.

For thousands of years, we put ourselves in the middle. The Earth was the center of the universe, and everything else moved around us. After Copernicus published his heliocentric model in 1543, it took generations before the idea settled in, and not only because of the science. It clashed with the Church, which banned his book in 1616, and with everyday experience. From where we stand, it really does look as if the Sun moves around us. When I read Sagan’s Cosmos this year, one detail stuck with me: the Greek astronomer Aristarchus had already put the Sun at the center about 1,800 years earlier, and hardly anyone listened. And a bit of everyday geocentrism is still with us. We still say the Sun rises and sets^[2]. It’s hard to accept that you are not at the center of it all when everything within your own horizon suggests you are.

Carl Sagan made the same point with a single photo. In 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward Earth from about six billion kilometers away, and our planet showed up as a dot smaller than a pixel. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote that this image challenges our “imagined self-importance” and the belief that we hold some privileged position in the universe. In the same book, he walks through what he calls the Great Demotions, one discovery after another that moved us further from the middle. He expected contact with life elsewhere to be the last of them^[3]. Astronomers have since confirmed more than 6,000 planets outside our solar system^[4]. I’m no astronomer, but statistically it seems far more likely than not that we are not the only life out there. We just haven’t gotten used to the thought.

This time it’s on our own turf

Maybe the next Great Demotion won’t come from the stars at all. Every one of the earlier ones came from far away, from the sky. AI is different. For the first time, something competes with our uniqueness right here on Earth, and it’s a product we built ourselves.

It started with productivity, and with coding in particular. Software skills that people spent years acquiring suddenly aren’t so uniquely human anymore. I have felt this shift in my own work. In due diligence on real estate assets, I used to go through stacks of documents line by line, looking for the few findings that actually matter. That was classic grind work, and AI now does a large part of it. The bigger shift for me was financial modeling. Not long ago, I built Excel models by hand, cell by cell. Today I can have AI build impressive financial models in Python at a speed I still find mind-blowing. I still need to know what the model has to do, and the planning and architecture remain my job. But the implementation is many times faster, and that jump happened in a very short time.

We like to point at the typical weaknesses of language models. “It hallucinates.” True. But we are quick to forget how many mistakes we make ourselves. To err is human, or so we say. AI is also available around the clock and doesn’t get tired at four in the afternoon. If I’m honest, AI already beats many people on a lot of purely technical tasks, and often that includes me. As an economic resource, human labor has already lost much of its uniqueness. It’s not a pleasant thought, but I think it’s an accurate one.

What’s left

It gets harder with the soft stuff: social skills, empathy, gut feeling, intuition, love. Here we still seem to be unique, at least for now. Whether it stays that way, nobody knows.

And this is where it quickly turns philosophical. What are feelings, actually? Why is it so hard for us to imagine that an AI might one day develop feelings of its own? What really separates the biochemical processes in our brains from the ones and zeros in a machine? I came across a version of this question in Stephen Hawking’s last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He describes life, roughly, as an ordered system that keeps itself going against disorder and can reproduce itself. By that standard, he argues, even computer viruses count. He also imagines self-replicating machines as “a new form of life,” built from electronic parts instead of molecules, that could one day replace DNA-based life^[5]. As far as we know, evolution has only ever happened in organic form. Who says it has to stay that way? I know too little about neuroscience or physics to answer any of this. These are simply the questions I can’t stop asking.

The part that isn’t easy

I’m an enthusiastic adopter. I see curious, quick adoption of AI as one of my core strengths, and AI is part of my workflows and, yes, of my thinking. But I feel the downsides on myself, too.

I’ve written about the cost of working this way on How I use AI: the drained evenings, the slot-machine pull of one more prompt. Here I’m more interested in where some of that unease comes from.

Part of what makes this hard, I think, is that we haven’t accepted yet that we are no longer unique in these technical areas. What we learned the hard way, over years of school and university, suddenly seems to have little economic value. But how much of that was really uniquely human? A lot of my education was memorizing and grinding. It taught me to work hard and push through, but critical thinking often fell by the wayside. Sometimes I had to work against the teaching methods to get there, and like most students, I mostly looked for the shortest path to the best grade. Is that what made us special?

Letting go

So here is where I land, for now. We shouldn’t cling to our supposed uniqueness the way we have so many times before. The result is what counts, so I use AI wherever it makes sense and put my own effort into what still needs a person. That also means letting go of skills I worked hard for, like building every financial model cell by cell in Excel. The same goes for writing every word on this website myself. This Note is a good example: it began as a long stream of my own raw thoughts in German, and AI helped me shape them into what you are reading now.

I’m torn about all of this more often than this text might suggest, and my views may change. The field certainly will. But I keep thinking about what happened after Copernicus. Losing the center didn’t make our world smaller. It made the universe a lot bigger, and centuries of exploring followed. I suspect this time will be similar. Once we stop defending the idea that we are the only ones who can think, a far more interesting question opens up: what we want to discover next, and what we want to spend our own time on.

Sources

1. Benj Edwards, “Google’s Will Smith double is better at eating AI spaghetti … but it’s crunchy?,” Ars Technica, May 2025. Ars Technica article
2. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Random House, 1980), chapter 3, “The Harmony of Worlds,” and chapter 7, “The Backbone of Night.”
3. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Random House, 1994), chapter 1, “You Are Here,” chapter 3, “The Great Demotions,” and chapter 20, “Darkness.”
4. NASA Science, “Exoplanets.” NASA exoplanet overview
5. Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (Bantam Books, 2018), chapter 3, “Is There Other Intelligent Life in the Universe?”