George Hotz, the Silicon Valley hacker, once defined what it means to be a good person in a blog post titled “You are a Good Person.” His definition was simple and clear: someone who, over the course of a lifetime, produces more than they consume. Farmers and engineers are good; private equity managers and real estate speculators are not, he argued. It sounds like common sense at first glance — but in 2026, when AI is sending productivity through the roof, is “production > consumption” still a valid ethical yardstick?
The Trap of Productivity Ethics
Hotz’s logic is clean. For society as a whole to be sustainable, its members must, on average, produce more than they consume. But here the first trap reveals itself.
What counts as “production”?
He classifies farmers, engineers, construction workers — even McDonald’s cooks — as producers. Lawyers, lobbyists, real estate agents, and salespeople, on the other hand, he writes off as unproductive. That distinction seems stuck in the values of the 19th-century industrial era: the view that only physical output qualifies as production, and that services or intermediation are parasitic.
Reality, though, is more complicated. When a skilled lawyer fends off a baseless lawsuit against a company, they are effectively protecting the resources that company can then pour into R&D. A salesperson who gets a good product into more people’s hands is creating value too. And a real estate agent who matches housing demand with supply is, undeniably, providing a service.
The more fundamental problem is that in the age of AI, the very definition of “production” is coming loose. If GPT writes the code, Midjourney makes the designs, and robots run the assembly line, how exactly are we supposed to measure human productivity?
How AI Is Reshaping the Landscape of Work
The era of AI agents, which kicked into high gear in 2024, is completely overturning the concept of productivity. One Korean startup’s development team of five achieved the output of a conventional 50-person team. Are they “more productive” — or have they simply made good use of a tool called AI?
The “unproductive” jobs Hotz criticizes are changing just as fast. Real estate agents automate market analysis and matching with AI; lawyers hand off document review to AI. In that world, their value comes not from sheer output volume but from judgment and accountability.
More important still is the fact that, in the AI era, the human role is shifting from “producer” to “planner” and “supervisor.” Farmers now manage their fields with drones and sensors; engineers design alongside AI copilots. “Human production” in the purest sense is steadily shrinking.
A Reality Check on Korean Society
What happens when we apply Hotz’s argument to Korea? The local equivalents of the “unproductive rich” he attacks would be building owners, heirs to family conglomerates, and real estate speculators. And it is genuinely questionable how much they contribute to society’s overall productivity.
But Korea has a larger manufacturing share than the United States, and its real economy rests on solid ground. Companies like Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, and LG Chem are still in the business of “making” things. K-pop and K-dramas, for their part, generate intangible “products” in the form of cultural content.
The catch is that even these manufacturers are cutting jobs as they adopt AI. Hyundai Motor rolled out an AI quality-inspection system starting in 2025 and trimmed its inspection workforce by 30%. Does that make them “unproductive”?
A New Standard for Productivity
It’s time to move beyond Hotz’s binary thinking. In the AI era, productivity should be measured not by quantity but by quality — not by individual output but by the efficiency of the system as a whole.
So let me propose a new standard. Instead of “consumption < production,” the question should be whether someone has helped advance the well-being of society as a whole. The edtech founder using AI to close the education gap, the planner improving elderly-care services, the marketer cultivating a culture of sustainable consumption — all of them are “producers” too.
Of course, Hotz’s core message still holds. An attitude that leans on other people’s labor and chases nothing but unearned income is not sustainable. But that standard cannot rest simply on “physical output.”
What the AI era needs is a more refined system for measuring value. What you have made, improved, connected, and protected — and how all of it has affected society as a whole. That should become the new measure of productivity.
In the end, it comes back to a question of attitude. For what purpose, and in what way, will you use this tool called AI? That choice is what will make you a true “producer.”
