Beautifully said. The horses example is rich because there are experiences and virtues that are essential to activities, and when we relate to the activity diff

Beautifully said. The horses example is rich because there are experiences and virtues that are essential to activities, and when we relate to the activity differently, it raises the question of which aspects or facets of it were essential. With horses, the feedback in a purely animal to animal relationship was a channel to our relationship with the rest of nature, the world, and the universe or creation. Only a tiny minority of people are able to experience that today, and an even more tiny subset of those bring the virtues of that relationship into the world around them to enrich our apprehension of it. The same could be said for ditch digging, but now that nobody has to do that manually anymore, rich people do crossfit to experience the attendant physical virtue. I'd wonder what the post-AI version will be. With AI and language models, something similar will likely occur, where like cars and engines, it creates mediation and decoupling from what was natural and real, and confines experience within material and largely narrative abstractions. I can write and create movingly sometimes because I've spent a lifetime practising it. AI (like all tech) creates economic indifference to "content," sort of the way people talking about the "alienation of labour," were on about 150 years ago. I think there are essential virtues in writing (now "content creation") that automating it to the point of economic indifference will also cause us to eschew, and we don't know them until we miss them - and maybe hire personal "reality" trainers to help us reconnect with what we feel we have lost.