The report used to take you three days. Yesterday it appeared in nine seconds, and your job was to read it through and fix the two things it got wrong.
Nothing changed on the org chart. Same desk. Same salary, for now. But something moved underneath you, and you felt it move. You used to make the thing. Now you check it.
The tool is called artificial intelligence, and the word your company uses for what it did to your work is efficiency.
You spent twenty years getting good at this. The skill was hard to get, which meant it was scarce, which meant you were worth something for having it. Last month they asked you to correct the machine's drafts carefully so it could learn from you, and you did that well, because doing things well is who you are. The arithmetic held for two decades. It does not hold now.
At two in the morning the question loses its workplace framing. The company drops out of it, and what is left is whether you are worth anything at all.
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?" (Psalm 8:3-4)
David lies out under a sky he cannot measure, and he feels like nothing. He has found something vast enough to make his own life look like a rounding error. The ache you carry to your desk is three thousand years old. Only the mirror has changed. Stars outclassed him. Something your own species built has outclassed you.
The answer arrives as a coronation.
"You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour." (Psalm 8:5)
No inventory of human ability, no comparison with anything else in that sky. God calls him small, and then sets a crown on his head.
Verse 4 asks what a creature like this could possibly be worth. Verse 5 answers by crowning him. Nothing about him changed between the question and the crown.
A crown that was never given for capability cannot be taken by something more capable.
"You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet." (Psalm 8:6)
Even the dominion arrives as a handover. The human does not take it and does not qualify for it. God gives it away to someone he has just described as barely more than nothing. The psalm has no earning in it anywhere.
None of this gives you back the three days the report used to take. It does not restore the standing you had in the room when you were the only person who could do the thing. In some of that work people are not better any more, and I will not pretend otherwise. The psalm never entered that competition. Your worth was settled before the contest existed, by someone who was not measuring. A benchmark can tell your company who should write the report next quarter. It cannot revise a verdict reached before anyone was counting seconds.
The crown was on your head before your first day of work. It is on you now, at a desk that has quietly changed shape around you, while you read through someone else's output looking for errors.
God put it there without consulting your output. Your output cannot reach up and remove it.
You are still wearing it. You have been the whole time.
