In 1999, someone asked me to adjust a photo in Photoshop: "Can you make her look more directly into the camera?"
I'd spent years mastering the tool. I knew the boundaries. "Not really possible," I said. "Maybe with 2 days of pixel-by-pixel retouching."
Last week, my 10-year-old niece spoke into an iPad. Asked for something I wouldn't have dared to request from a computer. It worked.
She doesn't know what's impossible. I'm starting to think that's not a bug.
Constraints are the condition for creation
Constraints have forced us humans to be creative. Limited resources. Limited capabilities. Limited tools. Laws of nature that don't bend.
Human ingenuity is the history of learning to fight, defy, and live within limitations. Something looked like there were less limits? Gets celebrated as a creative hallmark. Progress that pushed boundaries.
Artists know: the blank page is terrifying. Because of infinite possibilities. The first stroke is the hardest.
Constraints are not the enemy of creation. They're the condition for it.
That condition is dissolving
We are entering abundance.
Technical limitations? Disappearing.
Personal capabilities? Augmented beyond recognition.
Energy abundance? Maybe next.
Going from imagination directly to creation is wild. Even wilder: this is becoming reality for us all, at once.
In 2010, I told a movie producer friend: "One day, friends will sit down for movie night and a custom film will generate – matching everyone's preferences, in real time."
Back then I had no clue how. Now, we're almost there.
From creation to predictive creation
After direct, real-time creation from ask or imagination comes the next level: predictive creation.
AI that knows what you'll want before you do. Creates without being asked. Perfectly matching your preferences, humour, taste. No need to imagine. No need to ask. It just appears.
From then on, will thinking and transferring thoughts into creation be necessary at all?
Will our species – that once ruled them all, that created our worlds – be reduced to a mere consuming, absorbing organic mass? Without a need or will to create or shape anything anymore? Not enslaved. Just obsolete.
The generational divide
We learned to fight, defy, and live within constraints. The next generation might grow up without those. They'll think natively in abundance.
We'll struggle. Just like the generation before us with digitalisation. For them, information – even music – was physical, on paper and tapes. Meeting someone meant being reliably at an agreed place and time.
They took longer to adapt. So will we. Until then:
The prime time of humanity
We might be living in the prime time of humanity.
Still at the top of the food chain, before AI surpasses us. With challenges demanding genuine human thinking.
And our tools to tackle them were never better.
Enough constraints to spark creativity.
This window might not last. So:
Build while building still means something.
Create while creation still demands imagination.
Solve problems while solving them still needs us.
What a time to be alive.