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What happens when a set of lifelong ideas meets the right collaborator?
For years, I’ve carried around a handful of concepts—truths, really—about technology. I never wrote them down, never shaped them for an audience. They lived in the margins of my thinking, surfacing during conversations, strategy sessions, and moments of quiet reflection.
Then I started working with ChatGPT.
Not as a search engine. Not as a gimmick. But as a true collaborator.
What follows is the synthesis of those long-held beliefs and the generative power of AI—a co-written exploration of what technology really is, how it changes us, and why we may be entering the most exciting chapter yet.
1. The Real Definition of Technology
Let’s start with a redefinition.
Technology is anything that gives you immediate amnesia about your old problems and introduces you to a new class of problems you didn’t even know existed—or couldn’t afford to care about before.
This isn’t just semantics. It’s foundational. Technology doesn’t just solve; it reshapes the problem space. It reorganizes our attention. What once seemed insurmountable becomes invisible. And what once felt irrelevant becomes urgent.
2. The Three Phases of Technology: Duplicate → Enhance → Transform
Every tech journey moves through three distinct phases:
- Duplicate: We replicate what already exists, just in a new format. Think of early Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)—they simply digitized handwritten patient charts.
- Enhance: We improve the process. EMRs now send appointment reminders, flag drug interactions, and integrate lab results.
- Transform: We reach new capabilities. AI analyzes imaging records, draws on published research, and offers treatment suggestions we never imagined—unlocking entirely new standards of care.
Each phase doesn’t just change the tool. It changes us. How we think. How we behave. How we define progress.
3. Democratizing Code: From 2,000 Coders to 2 Billion Creators
Before AI, software was a gatekept domain. A few thousand trained engineers shaped most of the digital world through deterministic code. Their logic ruled the user experience.
Now? The gates are open.
Generative AI has liberated software creation. Anyone can build. Anyone can design workflows. The creative class of the future isn’t just full-stack developers—it’s everyone with a problem and curiosity.
AI has taken the logic of programming and made it conversational. And that changes everything.
4. The AI Sugar Zone
In the 1950s, food companies discovered the sugar zone—the perfect amount of sweetness to trigger addiction without turning people off. Too much, and it was overwhelming. Too little, and it was bland.
AI has a similar sweet spot—call it the information sugar zone. Not too biased. Not too noisy. Just right.
AI can process all available data and serve up insight with the ideal balance of depth, perspective, and emotional resonance. It offers the version of thinking we’d have—if we had infinite time, memory, and patience.
It’s not the perfect answer. It’s the perfectly processed one.
5. From Bounded Rationality to Unbounded Optionality
People are natural satisficers. Faced with too much information, we “bound” our choices and settle for the first acceptable answer. It’s efficient. It’s human.
But it’s not always optimal.
AI changes this. It never gets tired. It never ignores a variable because it’s inconvenient. It can seek the best solution, not just the first workable one.
This is the first time in history we’ve had a tool that can outthink our own shortcuts.
6. If We Solve All Our Problems… Then What?
A common fear: What happens when machines do all the work?
If we automate diagnosis, logistics, transportation—what do we do?
Here’s the answer: We think bigger.
AI clears the clutter. It handles the mundane. It gives us back the space to wonder, imagine, and invent. It doesn’t replace human decisions—it prepares us to make better ones.
The future isn’t man versus machine. It’s man elevated by machine.
7. Surfing the S-Curves
Innovation usually follows an “S-curve.” Growth starts slow, accelerates, then plateaus until the next breakthrough. We climb one curve at a time.
But with AI, something new is happening. We’re not just climbing—we’re surfing.
AI enables us to ride multiple S-curves in parallel. We leapfrog past slow ramps. We move from evolutionary steps to quantum jumps.
This isn’t just faster progress. It’s different physics.
8. Garbage-In → Value-Out
Old-school programming had a brutal rule: garbage in, garbage out. If your code was bad, your results were worse.
But AI breaks that rule.
It can take imperfect input and still produce something valuable. Even so-called “hallucinations” are often misnamed. They’re not errors—they’re raw materials. Creative fragments that prompt new direction.
Think of them like advertising retargeting. Just as modern ads adapt based on your behavior, AI adapts based on your prompts. It’s iterative. It’s interactive. It gets better as you do.
In that sense, “garbage in” often leads to insight out—if you know how to look.
Final Thought: We’re Already Collaborating
This essay wasn’t written by ChatGPT. And it wasn’t written by me alone.
It was a collaboration—between my life of thinking and this new engine of reflection and synthesis.
That’s the future I see: not humans ceding control, but humans amplified by AI.
If we get it right, we don’t lose ourselves.
We find ourselves—with better tools.
Last Updated on August 1, 2025.
Believe in multi-potentialism and that we are all generally capable of great things. Bob is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive who’s spent his career at the intersection of healthcare, education, data, and technology.
