I was wrong about the internet. Not about the technology. The technology did everything we thought it would. I was wrong about what it would do to people. What it actually ushered in — the attention economy, the disintermediation of expertise, the collapse of things that used to require craft — could be argued as a devolution. I believed. I was completely wrong.
So when I tell you I think AI is different, I need you to know I'm not 25 anymore. I know what it feels like to be certain about a technological revolution and watch what actually happens. I'm not making that mistake again. What I'm making instead is a smaller, more specific claim. And I want to show you where it came from.
The kid who didn't fit the room
1995. I'm 13. The class assignment is to present a new product. My classmates present skateboards and snowboards. I present a laptop I designed. Not one I owned. One I built in my head from specs I'd been reading in Computer Shopper and PC Magazine every month. 486 processor. 32 megabytes of RAM. Notebook form factor. I knew exactly why none of it was practical. I designed past the constraints anyway. Nobody got it.
My teacher, Ms. Farrell, got it enough. She didn't understand what I was presenting — how could she, in 1995, with a 13-year-old describing a laptop that couldn't exist yet? But she made space for me. She made sure the room made space. I felt seen. Not because anyone understood what I was saying. Because someone decided the room had room for it. I've never forgotten her.
"The label arrived 30 years after the instinct."
I didn't know what design was yet. I just knew the thing I was most interested in wasn't a product I wanted to use. It was a product I wanted to exist. The distinction took another decade to name.
Years later I'd encounter a Star Trek principle — IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations — and recognize something I'd already been practicing. The person whose reference pool points somewhere else. The kid who can't connect with the room. The designer who keeps asking: what about the person the pattern missed? I didn't adopt that philosophy. I recognized it.
Same with Ex Astris Scientia. From the stars, knowledge. Go toward what you don't understand. Come back with it. I did that at 13 with Computer Shopper and a processor spec I had no reason to know. I did it in 2008 when I went looking for an IT director nobody told me to find, learned a proprietary file format over a weekend, and eliminated a manual data entry process that had run for years. I did it every time I walked into a room with the people using the tools I build and asked them to show me what their days actually looked like. The motto didn't give me a method. It named one I already had.
Star Trek wasn't popular for 60 years because it had good special effects. It kept insisting the future could be better than the present, and that getting there required treating every person as worth designing for. I absorbed that over 35 years before I connected any of it to my work. The language arrived. The instinct was already running.
The reckoning
A few weeks ago I was sitting with research I'd commissioned — formal, sourced, methodologically credible — on what happens historically when execution commoditizes in knowledge professions. Legal, marketing, design. The pattern across all three was consistent and not comforting. Execution commoditization doesn't automatically produce a judgment premium. The value accrues to platforms. The practitioners who thought craft would protect them found out it didn't.
I sat with it. And then I pushed back. Not to dismiss it. The research was sound. But I found the seam: all of that evidence is about automation. Automation has always dismantled the execution layer. The record shows judgment doesn't survive that automatically. But AI isn't automation. It's not downstream of the judgment process. It's inside it. A reasoning partner operating at the level of the thinking itself.
I used AI to sharpen a conviction that AI's own research was arguing against. The act was the argument.
I'm not pie-eyed. I watched what the internet did. But there's a version of this where the floor rises for everyone and the ceiling rises for practitioners who use it like that. Where judgment becomes more legible, not less. Where the designer who can trace a call back to a specific user, a specific need, a specific moment the pattern didn't account for — becomes harder to replace, not easier.
That bet might not pay off. My father-in-law says everything is cyclical. He's probably right. If the cycle closes badly, I want to have been wrong on the right side of it. On the side of the humans. On the side of the person the dropdown didn't have room for. That's the right side. Even if I'm wrong.
What I know now
My son Ezra is four. He doesn't play with toy keys. He studies real ones — which key, which lock, which door. The same intensity I had at 13 with a laptop that couldn't exist yet. I didn't teach him that. He arrived with it.
The instinct doesn't get installed. It arrives. Your job — as a parent, as a designer, as a leader — is to be Ms. Farrell. Make space for the thing you don't fully understand yet. Hold it until it finds its language.
I spent 35 years building a design philosophy before I had a name for it. The name is Tanagra. Every piece I write from here is another event that becomes language. You're already in it.