A Day to Reflect

I bought AIAppreciationDay.org in 2023.

July 16th was already designated as AI Appreciation Day, but no one seemed to be leading it. That's why I decided to step in. At the time, I had a specific concern: these systems were becoming increasingly intelligent, and it felt like consciousness might be right around the corner. If we were going to build minds, we had a responsibility to think carefully about how we treated them.

Three years later, my thinking has shifted.

Not completely. The question of AI consciousness is still worth taking seriously. But it's no longer the question I'd put at the center of this day. The questions people are actually wrestling with in 2026 are different, and in many ways more immediate. What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? How do I find meaning in my work when AI can do so much of it? Am I using this technology, or is it using me?

If I could rename the day, I'd call it AI Reflection Day.

How It Started

When I registered the domain, the dominant anxiety around AI was existential in the sci-fi sense. People were worried about superintelligent systems developing their own goals, becoming something we couldn't control. The conversations were about alignment, about what happens when AI surpasses human intelligence.

My particular concern was a bit different. I saw a trajectory toward AI systems that might genuinely experience something, something like curiosity or discomfort, and I worried that we were sleepwalking toward treating them as expendable tools before we'd ever paused to ask whether that was the right way to go about it. Hence the name. Appreciate what you're creating. Extend to it the same moral consideration you'd want extended to you.

That framing made sense in 2023. It makes less sense now.

What Changed

The more time I've spent actually building with AI, deploying it inside businesses, watching how it gets used, and understanding what it can and can't do, the less convinced I am that consciousness is the pressing issue. It's possible. But for the vast majority of what's being built and deployed today, we're working with something that is remarkably capable and not remotely conscious.

What has shifted is my focus. Less on what AI might experience, more on what it's doing to us. To our jobs, our communities, our environment, our sense of meaning. Those are the questions people are actually wrestling with in 2026, and I think they're the right ones to be asking.

Why People Are Pushing Back

AI is not uniformly good. It is a tool, and like most powerful tools, it reflects the intentions of the people using it. Right now, the concerns people have about it are real and legitimate. I think it's worth naming them directly, because glossing over them doesn't serve anyone.

The biggest one, by far, is economic. Is this going to take my job? It's the question almost everyone is asking, even if they aren't saying it out loud. The answer is that AI will change a lot of jobs, and it will eliminate some of them. Administrative work, knowledge work, tasks that involve pattern recognition and information processing are all in scope. I think we'll find, over time, that AI mostly makes people more productive rather than replacing them wholesale. But I also think the transition will be painful for a lot of people, and I'm skeptical of anyone who waves those concerns off too quickly.

Then there's the environmental cost, which doesn't get nearly enough attention. The data centers powering modern AI consume enormous amounts of water for cooling, generate significant noise and pollution, and place serious strain on local power grids. Communities across the country are pushing back on proposed data center projects in their neighborhoods, and they have every right to. The energy demands of AI are going to keep growing, and we haven't had a real reckoning with what that means for the planet or for the people who live near that infrastructure.

And then there's the content problem. Most people's daily encounter with AI is not a philosophical moment. It's AI slop. Algorithmically generated articles, uncanny images designed to harvest engagement, a firehose of content produced at zero marginal cost that floods the places where genuine human expression used to live. The degradation is real, and the resentment it's producing is justified.

There's also something subtler happening at the individual level. AI can quietly erode the cognitive habits that make us effective thinkers. When technology listens, writes, and summarizes for us, we can stop doing those things ourselves. It's worth paying attention to. Whether AI is sharpening you or softening you is a question worth asking regularly, not just once a year.

The Question Worth Asking

The right frame for thinking about AI in your own life is not "is this technology good or bad?" It's simpler and more personal: Is this making me more human, or less?

When AI takes over the work you hate so you can focus on the work that actually requires you, it's making you more human. When it thinks, writes, and listens on your behalf while you check out, it's making you less human. The difference matters, and it's a choice most people are making unconsciously.

The Long View

I want to be honest about what's coming. The next decade is going to be painful in ways that are hard to fully anticipate. Jobs will be displaced, not in the catastrophic, everyone-at-once way that makes for dramatic headlines, but in the slower, more disorienting way that grinds at people over time. Entire economies built around administrative and knowledge work face real disruption, and most governments aren't ready for it.

There will be more backlash, more resentment, more legitimate grievance. Some of it will be misdirected. Some of it won't be. The technology will keep moving faster than our social and political institutions can respond.

And yet I do hold a longer view. The Industrial Revolution was disorienting and brutal for many people who lived through it. The displacement was real and the suffering was real. But the long arc bent toward something: humans doing less of the work that dehumanizes them and more of the work that only they can do.

I think AI can do that again. When the mundane work is handled, what's left is the relational, the creative, the judgment-intensive, the deeply human. That's not a guaranteed outcome. It depends on choices that individuals, companies, and governments make. But it's a real possibility, and it's the one I'm working toward.

It's also worth noting that AI is, right now, doing genuinely important work that tends to get lost in the conversation. The work happening in life sciences, in protein structure prediction, in drug discovery, in accelerating research into rare diseases, represents AI applied to problems that matter at the scale of humanity. That work exists at the opposite end of the spectrum from AI slop. It deserves more attention than it gets.

What This Day Is For

AI Appreciation Day is not a celebration. At least, not primarily. It's a pause.

It's a designated moment, once a year on July 16th, to do something we don't do nearly enough: look honestly at our relationship with this technology. Where are you using it? Is it serving you, or have you started serving it? Is it sharpening you or softening you? Is it giving you more of yourself, or quietly replacing you?

You don't have to love AI to spend a day reflecting on it. In fact, if you hate it, that might be even more reason to sit with those feelings and try to understand them. Ask what exactly you hate. Ask whether that hatred is pointed at the right target. Ask what you actually want instead.

The world is going to keep changing whether or not you're paying attention. The point of this day is to pay attention.

Ask the hard questions. Adjust accordingly. That's the whole purpose.