You Were Never a Benchmark

We are about to spend a decade being outperformed, and most of us are not ready for how it will feel.

The machine will write faster than you, calculate better than you, remember more than you, and before long it will paint, compose, diagnose, and argue better than you too. On every axis anyone has ever thought to measure, the line is heading in one direction. If you have quietly staked your sense of worth on being good at things — and nearly all of us have, whether we admit it or not — then a strange grief is coming for you, and it will not announce itself as grief. It will feel like being slowly made redundant in your own life.

I want to offer the one idea that I think actually holds up under that pressure. It is the idea I had to write a whole book to say properly, so I will say the short version here: you were never a benchmark. Your worth was never a score you posted. And so a machine posting a higher score takes nothing from you at all.

The thing we quietly got backward

Somewhere along the way most of us absorbed a lie so common we stopped hearing it as a claim. The lie is that human worth is earned — that it is a running total of what you can do, produce, and outperform. Get the grades, win the job, make the money, be useful, be impressive, be needed. Bank the achievements and your value goes up. Fail, slow down, get sick, get old, get outcompeted, and it goes down.

If that were true, then the machine really would be coming for your worth, because it is coming for your rankings, all of them. But it was never true. It was only ever a workable-enough fiction back when humans were the only ones near the top of every leaderboard. Now that something else is climbing past us, the fiction is failing in public, and underneath it we can finally see what was there the whole time.

Dignity that can be outperformed was never dignity. It was standing, and standing can always be taken by whatever stands taller.

Bestowed, not achieved

The oldest account we have of what a human is does not say we are valuable because we are capable. It says something far stranger and far sturdier:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. (Genesis 1:27, ESV)

Hear what that does. It locates your worth before you have done anything at all. Not earned — bestowed. Not measured — declared. An image bearer is not valuable because of output; a newborn who has accomplished precisely nothing carries the full weight of it, and so does the person on the last day of a long illness who will never produce another thing. Believe it as scripture or hear it as the deepest poetry we have about ourselves. Either way it puts your value somewhere no benchmark can reach, because it was never a benchmark that put it there.

This is why a capable machine, however capable, cannot touch the thing that matters. It can take your tasks. It can take your edge. It can take your usefulness on any measurable Tuesday. It cannot take what was never yours by measurement in the first place. You do not lose an inheritance by being outrun.

What a machine cannot diminish

So let me be precise about what is actually at stake, because clarity is the mercy here.

The machine can diminish your monopoly on being smart. It cannot diminish that you are loved. It can end your uniqueness as a producer of good sentences. It cannot end your irreplaceability as this particular person, with this face, whom certain people would grieve for the rest of their lives. It can beat you at everything you can put a number on. It has no access whatsoever to the part of you that was never a number — the part that is chosen, missed, forgiven, held.

We are going to have to relocate our sense of worth, all of us, out of the leaderboard we are about to lose and back into the ground it always actually rested on. That is not a downgrade. For most people it is the first honest rest they have had in years. You were exhausting yourself defending a value that was never under threat, from a machine that was never really your rival for the thing that counts.

You were never a benchmark. You were an image bearer the whole time. Let the machine have the scores. It cannot have you.