Someone showed me a letter the other day.

We were in the polvaria — the same one, the one without photos on the door, the one where the polvo is good and the ribeiro costs four euros and the chalkboard menu hasn’t changed since 2011. A friend pulled out his phone and said, “Read this.” The way people do when they’ve found something that either confirms their worst fear or their best hope and they can’t tell which.

It was a letter from a man in San Francisco. A man who builds artificial intelligence for a living. He was writing to his family, his friends, the people who keep asking him “so what’s the deal with AI?” He said he’d been giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. But the gap between the polite version and the truth had grown too wide, and he couldn’t keep quiet anymore.

The letter was long. Earnest. The kind of writing that comes from someone who has seen something that frightened them and is trying very hard to frighten you just enough to make you move, but not so much that you freeze.

I read it twice. Then I ordered another coffee.

Here’s what the man said, roughly: that AI had already replaced his own job. That he describes what he wants built, walks away for four hours, and comes back to find it done. That the machine doesn’t just execute — it makes decisions that feel like judgment. Like taste. That this is coming for lawyers, doctors, accountants, writers, everyone. Not in ten years. Now. That the people who don’t prepare will be left behind.

He compared it to Covid. February 2020 — the “this seems overblown” phase. He thinks we’re in that phase now, except what’s coming is bigger.

I understand why my friend wanted me to read it. It’s a compelling letter. Well-argued. Clearly written by someone who genuinely cares about the people he’s addressing. There’s no malice in it, no salesmanship — or at least, if there is, it’s the unconscious salesmanship of someone so deep inside a thing that the thing has become the whole world.

And that’s what I want to talk about. Not whether he’s wrong. He’s probably not wrong about the capabilities. He’s a man who uses these tools every day, and I believe him when he says they’re extraordinary.

I want to talk about the letter itself. About what it means to write from inside the cathedral.

If you read the last thing I wrote — about the tourists and the locals in Santiago — you’ll remember the polvaria. The good place two streets away that the tourists never find because they’re photographing the façade.

The man who wrote this letter lives inside the cathedral. He knows every stone, every chapel, every echo. He has watched it being built. He understands the engineering in a way that someone standing outside never will. When he says the structure is extraordinary, he’s right. When he says it will change the city, he’s probably right about that too.

But he’s been inside so long that the cathedral has become the world.

When you live inside a thing — when your work, your investments, your social circle, your identity are all bound up in it — the thing fills your entire field of vision. Every improvement feels like a revolution. Every new capability feels like the ground shifting. And it is shifting, for you, because you’re standing on it.

The woman selling grelos at the market in Santiago does not feel the ground shifting. Not because she’s ignorant. Because her ground is different. Her ground is the price of grelos, the weather, her knees, whether her daughter will visit on Sunday. The cathedral is there — she walks past it every day. She knows it’s magnificent. But it is not her world. It is a building in her world, and her world contains many other things.

The letter says: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.”

I believe him. I also notice that he still has a job. He still has a company, investors, employees. He is not writing this letter from unemployment. He is writing it from a position of power so complete that the tool has freed him from the labour while leaving him in command of the outcome. He describes the work, the machine does it, and he collects the result.

This is not a story about displacement. This is a story about leverage. The man has not been replaced. He has been promoted — from engineer to architect, from builder to patron. The machine took his tools and handed him a throne.

Which is fine. Genuinely, I don’t begrudge it. But when he turns to the rest of us and says “this is coming for you,” he might want to specify what this is. Is it the tool, or the throne? Because I suspect they’re not distributed equally.

The letter compares AI to Covid. I want to sit with that comparison for a moment, because I think it reveals more than intended.

Covid did not affect everyone equally. That was, in fact, the defining feature of the pandemic. Some people worked from home in comfortable houses while others drove delivery trucks. Some industries boomed while others collapsed. Some countries vaccinated quickly while others waited. The virus was universal; the experience of it was not.

AI will be the same. The man in San Francisco will describe what he wants and walk away for four hours. The woman selling grelos will still be selling grelos. The junior developer in Bangalore will lose her job. The managing partner at the law firm will use AI to do the work of his associates, bill the same rate, and take the difference as profit. The associate will be invited to “reskill.”

The technology is universal. The consequences are not. And the letter, for all its sincerity, speaks as though everyone is standing in the same river. We’re not. Some of us are upstream. Some of us are downstream. The water hits differently depending on where you stand.

There’s a passage in the letter that stayed with me. The man says he used to go back and forth with the machine, editing, guiding, adjusting. Now he just describes the outcome and leaves. He says the machine has something that feels like “judgment” and “taste.”

I wonder about this. Not whether it’s true — I suspect it is, in the way that a well-trained eye can mistake a very good reproduction for an original. But I wonder what we lose when we stop going back and forth. When we stop editing, guiding, adjusting. When we describe what we want and walk away.

The back and forth is the work. Not the output — the process. The moment where you look at what the machine produced and think “no, not like that, like this” — that’s where the understanding lives. That’s where you learn what you actually want, which is often different from what you asked for. The man has freed himself from the labour. But the labour was where the thinking happened.

Moncho, the mechanic in Ourense — the one who listens to the engine before touching it — Moncho doesn’t diagnose by walking away. He diagnoses by paying attention. The attention is the skill. If you give him a machine that diagnoses automatically, he’ll use it, gratefully. But he’ll also know that something has been lost, even if the output is better.

I’m not saying the man is wrong. The capabilities are real. The acceleration is real. The disruption will be real.

But I’ve noticed something about letters from inside the cathedral. They always carry the same assumption: that the cathedral is the centre of the city. That what happens inside it radiates outward to everything. That the world arranges itself around the thing you built.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes the cathedral really does change everything.

But sometimes the city just grows around it, incorporates it, uses it for weddings and funerals, and gets on with the business of selling grelos and arguing about football and raising children who will one day photograph the façade and post it online and feel they’ve been somewhere.

The man in San Francisco sees the cathedral and says: everything changes now.

The woman in the market looks at the cathedral and says: that’s been there my whole life, filho. It was new once too.

I don’t know which of them is right. Probably both. The cathedral is extraordinary. The grelos still need selling. And the polvo in the polvaria is still the best meal in Santiago, even if the machine could write you a recipe.

It just wouldn’t know why it tastes like that.

Enfin.

The letter is “Something Big Is Happening” by Matt Shumer. Read it. He’s not wrong about the technology. I’m just not sure the technology is the whole story.