We’ve spent decades learning how computers want us to work. Find the app. Learn its menus and terminology and toggles. Does it have a Slack connector? A Swagger schema? No, it’s OpenAPI now. Actually, MCP is the current thing.
I think we’re at the start of a grand reversal: Computers adapting to the shape of our thinking and the circumstances of our lives, rather than the other way around.
I’m a visual thinker. Sometimes I need to move ideas around on a canvas. Sometimes a question arrives halfway through a walk, or talking, sketching, typing. My work should travel between these modes without waiting for a laptop and the right tab. Instead of bending to the computer, the computer should bend to us.
When we work together, those accommodations compound: Someone copies the update, someone else translates it, someone else remembers who else needs to know. Every workaround becomes something for someone else to work around. We automated the work, then gave everyone a second job managing and connecting the automations.
So here I am, finalizing this brief the night after the deadline. I tell my Dot to send it to my editor. Tomorrow I might wake up and yap for 19 minutes about changing the whole thing. “Tell the editor if that changes anything.” This is what the grand reversal looks like up close: The machinery rearranged itself around a sentence, instead of me rearranging myself around the machinery.
The machinery is in retreat. We might finally have room to think and live.
