Artificial intelligence is easy to scapegoat. People like to say this new technology is turning us into anxious, reactive people who need to ask ‘Chat’ or ‘Claude’ every question that pops into our heads. Headache? It’s probably cancer, and your preferred LLM can confirm that for you in seconds. But AI isn’t a villain. Instead, it’s the first serious tool we’ve had in years to undo what smartphones, screens, and constant connection have done to all of us.
To back up, it feels important to acknowledge that I’m what my younger colleagues might call a Grandpa Gen Z. I’m proud of that. I remember life before iPhones, let alone Facebook and Myspace. Most importantly, I know what a pager is. My dad carried one, and right now, I’m obsessed with researching what a modern version of that device would actually look like in practice. Because we need that; we need a tool that interrupts your life as much as your life actually requires being interrupted. What the ‘leaders’ of the AI wave, and touch screens before them, have conveniently forgotten is that technology owes us something in exchange for our attention.
The stakes of all this are pretty clear. Forget work or value or output. Relationships at the personal level will fray, if they haven’t already, when nobody can finish a sentence without checking their phone, or can’t eat dinner without the TV on or a screen in front of them. We’ve replaced real human connection with screens, with endless content, with anything but humanity all around us. What we have now is an entire generation being raised to believe that boredom is a malfunction, rather than a normal occurrence in day-to-day life.
If we build AI to chase engagement the same way phones and apps have for the last decade, we will only get more of what we already have: an increasingly lonely, stressed out, disconnected society. But if we build AI to take the grunt and rote work off a person’s plate instead, then we’ll have given people time, silence, and their lives back. Free from the constant pings of Slack, Outlook, texts, and everything else – what would you do?
Before I built any AI tool, I practiced law at a large firm and did work that on most days, felt like feeding a machine. Redlining, formatting, timekeeping, emailing, coordinating calendars; none of it required my full judgement, but it did require my full waking hours. I didn’t go to law school to get good at finding things. I went to think, argue, solve problems, and use my mind. Somewhere along the way though, I realized I was becoming good at being legible to the systems I worked inside, and worse at the parts of the job that made me want to be a lawyer in the first place.
I believe most people are experiencing some version of that right now. A paper published in August gives this a name: Robotoid humanness. Essentially, researches described a shift where people are organizing themselves around what algorithms can easily read and reward. They’re becoming more predictable and classifiable and are mistaking that compatibility for competence and real humanity. In the same way it took me a while to see the shift I was undergoing in law, I’m now worried this is happening writ large. People feel like they’re getting better at life, right up until they realize they’re measuring themselves by how smoothly they can interface with a machine, rather than the people around them. I’ve seen colleagues who answer on Slack faster than they answer their own family or friends. We built these tools with the idea that they would help us, and somehow, along the way, we started performing for them.
In the face of this, every few years someone tells us that we should just unplug. Delete the apps, buy a flip phone, and take a break from the online world. It never worked, and it was never going to work. We’ve been running this same experiment with social media for a decade, and abstinence has lost every single time because telling people to want less connection is a much harder sell than giving it to them differently. You can’t run a law practice off a flip phone or raise a funding round without email. The economy won’t let us opt out, so we’ve been conditioned to be connected all day, every day.
What we needed then, and still need now, is fewer companies building connective technology. We need companies that are willing to treat user’s health and actual quality of life as more important than the next quarter’s engagement metrics or bottom line. Did anyone force social platforms to optimize time on an app over time spent with family? I didn’t. These companies chose this, and people paid for that.
AI doesn’t have to repeat this. This is a rare moment when an entire industry can decide what winning means. What we must start with are better tools. Tools that are built to get the menial, rote work out of the way, and that get us all to silence and some quiet faster. We, as an industry, should be absolutely determined to find ways to silence the four hundred notifications we get every day across ten apps and figure out a way to weed out the pings that actually deserve our attention. We should want, badly, to protect the hours where judgement, empathy, and creativity happen, and give those hours back to people as fast as we can.
Here in Santa Monica, I watch people walk on the beach every morning, their phone in their hand, eyes down, completely ignoring the ocean that’s right there. This isn’t what any of us signed up for with the Internet, smartphones, and now AI.
Pagers might sound like some nostalgic joke, but it’s not a joke to me. It’s a bet on what good technology should do: present itself when you need it, and be completely invisible when you don’t. This is the future I want: an AI that quietly handles the noise of the day so you can be fully present for the parts of work and life that matter most.
