When Machines Write the Message For You
How AI is Reshaping Challenge and What it Means to Grow
My Personal Reflections
My audio diary is my attempt to share a bit about my own experience through the lens of the themes and meta themes of the following essay. If you prefer to understand the material via stories, I invite you to listen. I also invite you to read the essay itself, too.
In the summer of 2025, a novelist friend shared an uneasy truth: the blank page no longer intimidated her. Instead, she feared something else, a machine that could conjure drafts overnight. ChatGPT and similar AI models had become astonishingly adept at generating prose, sometimes lyrical, sometimes clunky, sometimes eerily close to a human style. “I still write,” she conceded, “but some of the magic is gone. And it’s also getting harder to get work.”
Her experience is no anomaly. Across sectors, individuals confront a silent upheaval. Challenges that once formed the backbone of creative and professional identity which included grappling with complexity, wrestling doubts, wrestling with raw ideas are increasingly smoothed, or even wholly transformed by algorithms and automation. Where effort and struggle once defined mastery, the landscape now shifts beneath human feet.
Consider the software engineer who once debugged endless lines of cryptic code, now guided by AI-powered assistants suggesting fixes, optimizing scripts, or even auto-writing bulk components. Or the legal researcher whose time-consuming task of combing through case law is accelerated by AI tools that synthesize and summarize mountains of legal documents. The challenges that built expertise are no longer the same: some have vanished, some have morphed, some have relocated to less visible terrain.
Challenge has always been a key ingredient of adaptability. It serves as the raw material shaping growth, resilience, and new capacities. For decades, psychologists and educators like Carol Dweck, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Angela Duckworth have mapped its terrain. Yet this quiet revolution in automation forces us to rethink core assumptions: In a world where once-formidable challenges fade, what remains for humans to wrestle with? And critically, who gains access to the new arenas of challenge? And who is left behind?
Why Challenges Matter
At its core, challenge is defined by tension: a demand that exceeds current capacities, provoking engagement that is equal parts cognitive, emotional, and physical. Psychologist Carol Dweck’s seminal work on growth mindset illuminated a deep truth: those who believe ability is malleable embrace challenge as opportunity; those with fixed beliefs tend to avoid difficulty to shield self-image. Challenge becomes the fertile ground where resilience, ingenuity, and character are cultivated.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, meanwhile, famously mapped the psychological landscape of flow which is a state of deep absorption and joy arising when the difficulty of a task matches one’s skill level. Flow reveals how challenge and capability intertwine to transform effort into fulfillment.
Angela Duckworth’s concept of grit extends this narrative to endurance over time: meeting challenge is not a momentary performance but a marathon of sustained effort and passionate persistence. In this line of thinking, challenge is not just a task but the essence of growth itself.
These ideas frame challenge as a complex, layered phenomenon, present in myriad domains: athletics, academics, creative arts, leadership, survival, etc. Climbing a mountain, solving a theorem, navigating social conflicts are examples of challenges that inspire growth by requiring us to stretch beyond familiar limits.
This understanding is deeply embedded in cultural norms, psychological theory, and educational practice.
Challenge signifies not simply difficulty but worthy hardship that helps shape identity and capacity.
But this framing assumes a stable landscape such as an environment where challenges are persistent and accessible enough to serve as formative trials. Automation, especially powered by artificial intelligence, disrupts this assumption in ways perhaps unprecedented.
Technology Removing Friction
Throughout history, technological innovation has reshaped skill demands. The industrial revolution automated manual labor; the calculator altered arithmetic pedagogy; GPS supplanted map-reading. What’s new is the scale and nature of current changes.
Artificial intelligence, with its ability to perform cognitive tasks once thought uniquely human like writing, analyzing, predicting is disrupting a broad spectrum of professions. According to a McKinsey’s 2025 report, AI continues to reshape the workforce in complex ways. AI is automating routine and repetitive tasks across manufacturing, administration, finance, content creation, and technical professions like coding and law, but also enabling workers to focus on higher-order skills.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, while AI and automation are expected to displace approximately 92 million jobs globally by 2030, they are simultaneously projected to create around 170 million new roles. This net gain of 78 million jobs reflects a fundamental transition and not an eradication of challenge, but rather a redistribution of where and how challenges manifest in the workforce. The shift underscores the growing importance of adaptability, reskilling, and navigating new configurations of work in an AI-integrated economy.
By automating foundational cognitive challenges, AI risks flattening the terrain where expertise traditionally grew. The friction disappears, and with it, perhaps the calluses of true mastery.
For many, this shift can feel liberating and thus freeing precious cognitive resources from drudgery. But for others, it spells disorientation, a loss of identity, and the shrinking of meaningful challenge.
Mindset Meets Machine
At first glance, Dweck’s growth mindset seems adaptable to this technological evolution. If the landscape shifts, so too can the challenges one pursues. Growth-minded individuals will seek new stimuli, embrace fresh arenas for development.
However, automation’s rapid pace complicates this hope:
Pace Outstripping Reskill Capacity: When the challenge landscape evolves faster than human educational or adaptive systems can respond, the cognitive and emotional load is overwhelming. The promise of growth meets the reality of instability, fostering stress rather than resilience.
Delegation and the Erosion of Struggle: Offloading difficult cognitive tasks to machines risks atrophying the very tolerance for challenge that growth mindset relies upon. When struggle ceases to be necessary, motivation and grit may wane.
Uneven Access to Adaptive Challenges: Those with resources and social capital may transition into higher-order challenges that are strategic, creative, ethical while others face deskilled roles or cyclical unemployment, falling into “challenge deserts” with limited growth opportunities.
Angela Duckworth’s archetype of grit becomes harder to operationalize when the content of perseverance shifts unpredictably or evaporates entirely. These realities complicate the simple story of mindset as a universal key to adaptation.
The Risk of Challenge Deserts
Automation does not spread equally. While high-skill professionals might find new, complex challenges emerging as machines take routine tasks, many workers encounter a diminishment of task complexity.
Sociologist Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, argues that skilled work and challenge are inseparable; when difficulty is stripped away, workers risk losing not only technical ability but also the sense of agency and purpose that comes from mastering their craft.
This creates a societal paradox: as some ascend to new adaptive plateaus, many others are consigned to roles lacking developmental stretch, fostering disengagement and social fragmentation. This division could deepen inequality, harming social mobility and cumulative human capital.
What Is Lost When Challenge Is Outsourced?
While not all struggle is good, certain challenges carry intangible value:
Cognitive Stretch: Deep intellectual engagement develops critical thinking and novel insight.
Emotional Regulation: Managing frustration and uncertainty cultivates psychological resilience.
Narrative Identity: Overcoming tasks forms the arc of self-understanding.
Carol Dweck reminds us that the satisfaction of growth comes from the struggle that precedes it; the achievement matters because we’ve had to work for it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi adds that real engagement depends on facing challenges that push us just enough to sustain focus and motivation. When automation strips away that optimal level of difficulty, it risks collapsing the arc of anticipation, struggle, and arrival that gives our work and our growth its depth and meaning.
Reframing Challenge Humanely
If machines now excel at demonstrations of expert knowledge and routine creativity, what uniquely human challenges remain?
Some promising domains:
Interpersonal Complexity: Navigating nuanced team dynamics, consensus-building, conflict resolution.
Ethical Judgment: Balancing competing moral claims, values, and futures in ambiguity.
Creative Originality: Producing work grounded in lived experience, perspective, and novel imagination.
Navigating Novel Uncertainty: Leading through crises defying precedent and prediction.
Richard Sennett argues that the value of human challenge lies in the slow accumulation of skill and the hands-on engagement that shapes both the product and the person. Strip away that process and hand it over to machines. And what remains may be efficient, even flawless, but it is hollowed of the agency, purpose, and depth that emerge only from the work of mastery.
The New Curriculum of Adaptability
As AI takes on an ever‑growing share of intellectual labor, adaptability will hinge on capacities that machines cannot replicate. These include the metacognitive awareness to gauge our own learning and shift course when conditions change; the ability to connect ideas across domains and bridge knowledge silos; the embodied presence that conveys meaning through physicality, timing, and atmosphere; and the emotional intelligence that maintains trust, empathy, and influence in human relationships.
For these capabilities to flourish, education and leadership must resist the temptation to make everything seamless. Instead, they must design experiences that challenge us which are effortful, growth‑driving demands that sharpen skill, deepen insight, and expand resilience. Without such friction, the very qualities that make us adaptable risk atrophying.
Additionally, knowing which challenges to accept is itself becoming a critical skill. The most meaningful struggles are those that intentionally shape who we become and stretch our capacities, refine our judgment, and strengthen our sense of purpose.
Challenge After the Machine
The novelist’s final reflection was hopeful: “If sentences are easier now, maybe I can finally focus on building worlds only I could imagine.”
This is not a eulogy for yesterday’s struggles. It is a call to pay close attention to where the real tests now live, who is allowed to face them, and how we might reconstruct the meaning of effort, mastery, and purpose for a transformed era. To engage with challenges fully, we must be willing to rethink the stories we attach to difficulty itself, replacing nostalgia for the past with curiosity about what new forms of growth might look like.
In this way, adaptability becomes less about scrambling to keep up with technology, and more about shaping an intentional partnership with it. We need to consider using our distinctively human capacities to direct its power toward challenges that deepen both our capability and our collective purpose.