6 June 2026
Every knowledge worker is getting a personal AI agent. Most companies are building a corporate one. The layer nobody is thinking about sits between them — and it's already forming.
The dominant AI discourse is a performance ledger — costs, jobs, benchmarks. It is a necessary conversation. It is also a profoundly small one. Every significant compression of the gap between imagination and execution has been met first with anxiety, and only later understood as an opening. We are at that moment again.
The logic of industrial production — make at scale, distribute across supply chains — is being quietly dismantled by converging technologies. AI, bio-manufacturing, 3D printing, and quantum computing are pointing toward a world where you buy a licence to produce rather than an object. The factory may be ending. The questions it raised may not.
We treat dates the way Buzz Lightyear treats infinity — as destinations we can name with conviction. But a date is almost never a forecast. It is a promise dressed as one, and once it is fixed, it stops describing the work and starts bending it toward itself. This is the quiet violence underneath most large plans.
For centuries we classified information because we couldn't process it. The labour of order became indistinguishable from the labour of thought. AI quietly inverts the relationship — and exposes a cost that runs deeper than jobs.
The worry about AI and curiosity has the argument backwards. The question is not whether the tool makes you passive. It is whether you were curious before you picked it up.
Information-intensive work has quietly borrowed against our mental reserves for decades. AI might finally offer a way to pay it back.
Most high-skilled cognitive work is spent at the bottom of the decision hierarchy — on choices that don't deserve the capability being used. AI's real promise isn't replacing judgement. It's absorbing the clerical load at the bottom of the hierarchy, and returning the mental resources that load was quietly consuming.
The path used to be visible. Now it is not — and that might be the point.
The tyranny of minor decisions is not a small problem. It is the thing quietly consuming the best of your mental life.
Everyone is asking how fast AI can work. Nobody is asking how fast humans can decide. That's the real bottleneck.
Essays and quick takes on AI, decision-making, and the shape of what's coming. Published when something's worth saying.