The Most Human Technology Ever Made
Most people aren't trying to save time. They're trying to spend it.
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
People are happier when they make things. The table your neighbor built himself beats the one he ordered from West Elm. Kids abandon their expensive toys by lunchtime and then spend all week making a basement fort with the boxes they came in. We know this about ourselves and yet we keep half-forgetting it, partly because most of the technology of the last hundred years was built to do the reverse: to let us have more while doing less.
That technology is wonderful. I can summon a (self-driving!) car or order groceries that show up in an hour. But almost none of it is what I’d point at if you asked me what makes a life worth living. A paintbrush has never saved anyone a single minute, and we’ve kept them within reach for tens of thousands of years.
A while ago, Eugenia Kuyda, who has spent years building AI consumer products, said something to me that I keep coming back to. Most people, she said, aren’t trying to save time. They’re trying to spend it.
Almost everything anyone says about AI, for it or against it, is an argument about time. Will it take jobs or augment them? How many minutes has the model shaved off writing the memo, and then off of reading it? Were the tokens worth what they cost?
But I think the more interesting thing about AI is that it’s also the other kind of technology, the paintbrush kind, the kind that lets us express ourselves as humans. A few technologies in history have managed to be both: language, the printing press, and the steam engine are all tools that saved enormous labor and, almost as a side effect, expanded what a person could be. AI belongs to that small category. It makes making things feel more possible.
Why does making matter so much more than consuming? Oliver Sacks had an idea late in his life that I keep coming back to. He observed that most people treat being present as the goal, as if the whole point of living were to sit inside the current second. He thought that was a little sad. The people he found most alive were soaked in the past and future at once: remembering, planning and dreaming. That’s what making does to you. It stretches you across all three tenses, because you’re building toward something you can already see, out of everything you’ve ever loved. Consuming, by contrast, parks you in the now.
Take social media. At the start it was a little miraculous: people taking the time to share what was happening and what they were thinking with each other. Then it became a contest. A call for attention. And once the algorithms took over, the thing that broke through was whatever was loudest, so people optimized for loud, and lately we’ve started calling the machine-made version of it slop.
But the feed was slop before any machine got involved. Slop is just what you get when everyone consumes and nobody creates, and the cure is people making things again, which AI is unusually good at enabling. That’s about the most anti-slop thing I can imagine. A companion you talk to and shape and argue with will do more for you than a celebrity you watch from across the internet, because one of them is a thing you make and the other is a thing that happens to you. It’s the difference between putting on an autogenerated Spotify playlist and making somebody a mixtape. A mixtape is you, smuggled into another person’s afternoon.
And this isn’t reserved for creatives. A master electrician in Kentucky with no computer science degree used AI to build a load-calculation tool that sells for $12.99 and replaces a $500 service call. A plumber canceled a $40,000 consulting contract after a single afternoon with OpenClaw got him further than the consultants had scoped in weeks. For most of computing history, if you couldn’t code, you were a consumer of other people’s ideas. That’s over. The cost of trying things has collapsed, and the people picking this up first are not the ones anyone predicted. Software is about to be everywhere the way YouTube made video everywhere, and most of it will be built by people who’d never have called themselves builders.
The same thing is arriving in the time you spend at home. The McKinsey-esque (and unimaginative) version of the promise of AI is that everything in your life will get ten percent more efficient. The better version is that every year or so, you’ll find one new thing to fall in love with and pour your free time into it. None of this matters, in the big serious sense of the word, which is the good news, because the things that don’t matter are usually the things people love the most. Fan fiction. A kid DJing in his bedroom. Some ridiculous game you and your daughter invent on a rainy Saturday. It’s also where nearly every great consumer company has ever come from. As my partner Chris Dixon said, the next big thing will start out looking like a toy.
Work is the same story. The good part of any job is the stretch where you’re doing the thing you’re genuinely good at, and everything around it, the politics and the status and the meetings about other meetings, is a tax you pay to get there. AI is starting to eat the tax. As it shrinks, the job feels more like yours, more like the thing you’d have done anyway. And the part of work that feels like play is where the real breakthroughs have always lived. The good ideas almost never climb out of strategy books. They come from some side quest a person went down because they couldn’t help themselves, the strange weekend project, the rabbit hole that paid off.
There’s an old story about the moment the hippies turned into the finest capitalists the country had ever produced, well-explored in David Brooks’ book Bobo’s in Paradise. All that sixties individuality, the stuff that was supposed to be the sworn enemy of money, gradually evolved into the engine of it. The war between the strivers and the rebels didn’t end with a winner; it ended with a merger. Being a distinct person stopped being a rebellion and became the whole economy (some companies that exemplify this include Ben & Jerry’s, Restoration Hardware, and Range Rover).
What I want is more of that, pushed harder. Individuality at scale. Which is why the frightened version of the AI story, the one where a few companies own everything and everyone else sinks into a permanent underclass, has always felt to me like the wrong story. The side quests and the rabbit holes and the weekend projects don’t ladder up into a neat diagram of who owns what. Whatever barbell this thing creates, you’ll feel it first in the texture of your own days, in what you get to make and who you get to become, long before it ever turns into a chart of how society is arranged.
Look at the people who already use this stuff all day. They haven’t gone limp and checked out. They’re working more, and they’re further into it. People who spent years as spectators of their own ambitions are finally actualizing them. Give someone the means to build the thing they’ve been carrying around in their head, and they don’t lean back. They lean in. They stay up too late, and they text you at 2am to show you what happened.
A few months ago I went on a strange guys’ trip where the daily routine was four hours on our laptops in the morning, then padel, then a long dinner, and the dinner was mostly four grown men showing each other what they’d built that morning. That felt like the future to me, mostly because of how badly everyone wanted to show their work.
Here’s what I think happens when execution gets cheap. For most of history, the bottleneck on making something was never the idea, it was the grind: acquiring the years of skill, raising the money, assembling the team, and getting the permission. So most people’s best ideas died inside them, unmade. Lift that bottleneck and the thing that decides what gets built is no longer whether people can justify the VC funding or the enterprise-level capital expenditure, but who has something to say. The most human thing about you stops being a private quirk and starts being the point.
Individuality was supposed to be the luxury you bought once you’d made it. I think it’s about to become the thing everyone gets to spend their life on, the work itself. So when I picture where this goes, I see a lot of people making strange, beautiful, slightly pointless things and handing them around to see what happens. The toys were fine. But we always wanted to play with the boxes.
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This is the best articulation of the positive integration of this technology I’ve seen yet. Thank you. The paintbrush analogy is fantastic. AI is also so helpful for closing gaps in practical knowledge. As one small example, I never learned basic cooking skills and it’s been an area of struggle and frustration - until now. I am finally enjoying cooking and building confidence. It supports my creativity as I share ideas and get step-by-step instructions on how to achieve them and failure modes to avoid.
This is the problem when people get way, way, way too far out into Big Think instead of grounded in simple, daily reality. I don’t want whatever calendar app I can make; I want the best calendar app possible, that will anticipate problems I don’t even know I’ll have.
Taste. Careful design. Craft. These are durable advantages and scalable to everyone.
Look at food. We have had great food-making technology for quite some time. I can make a huge range of things based on my imagination in my very own home. Turns out restaurants and going out to eat are more popular than ever because I don’t want to eat my own slop. Taylorism is alive and well, baby.