The Most Human Technology Ever Made - by Anish A - a16z
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The Most Human Technology Ever Made<br>Most people aren't trying to save time. They're trying to spend it.
Anish A<br>Jul 13, 2026
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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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?<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.
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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.<br>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.<br>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...