Human Made

Welcome. I think it's time to question everything. Welcome back. I really hope you guys are enjoying the series. At the end of the last memo, I left you with a question. If technology makes more and more things abundant, what stays scarce? And I said I had some ideas, and I thought some of them were going to look surprisingly human, so here we are. Because I think one of the things that may become increasingly valuable in the future is something that until very recently, we almost never had to think about human-made. I don't mean that in some anti-AI through your computer in the late kind of way, that's definitely not where I'm going. I use AI every fucking day. I'm using it today. I mean something much simpler. For most of human history, if you saw a painting, somebody painted it, if somebody built a table, somebody built it, if you heard a song, somebody played it. If you read a book, somebody wrote it. If somebody showed you a photograph, there was probably a camera pointed at something that actually happened. We didn't need a label that said human-made, human involvement was assumed, and now that's changing. Because we're moving toward a world where almost anything digital can exist without the thing it appears to represent ever actually happening. A photograph of an event that never happened, a voice saying words that a person never said, a musician who doesn't even exist, a person talking to a camera who never stood in front of one. A book, nobody sat down and wrote, a painting that nobody painted. Maybe eventually a movie where none of the actors existed. Nobody held a camera and there was never even a set. And right now, we still have this little safety blanket where everybody says, well, you can tell. And it's true, you can tell if something's AI, you can tell if it's AI sloped. Because that's what everybody says. Look at the hands, look at the lighting, look, listen to the voice. Look at the weird movement. Okay, maybe today but I think you can tell is a bridge too. Those mistakes are gonna get better. And when they do the question changes as stops being, can I tell if this is AI and becomes, did a human actually make this? And maybe more important question, do I care? Because sometimes I absolutely do not care. If AI organizes a spreadsheet, for me, I don't need the spreadsheet to have a soul. If a robot cleans my floor, I don't need to establish the provenance of the vacuuming. If my dishwasher washes the dishes, I don't need the dishwasher to have passion, right? I needed to wash the fucking dishes. There are enormous categories of things where automation is probably just better, faster, cheaper, more consistent, safer, maybe eventually and dramatically better than what a human can do. And that's fine. But I don't think everything belongs in that category. Think about a scarf somebody knitted, a walking stick that somebody carved by a hand, a chair, a table, a piece of pottery, a painting, a handmade knife, a guitar. Bread from a bakery, something somebody cooked, a spice blend that somebody actually stood there and worked on until it tasted right. Those things can contain something besides the finished object. They can contain human time. Somebody spent part of their finite life making that thing. And that's weirdly important because eventually every machine might make a better table. Straighter, stronger, cheaper, perfect every time. And for a lot of purposes, give me the machine made table. But there's another table where I know who built it. Maybe I saw his shop. Maybe I heard a saw running at nine o'clock at night. Maybe I know why he picked that piece of wood. Maybe he screwed something up and had to start over. Maybe there's some tiny imperfection that only exists because a person made a decision. Those aren't necessarily defects anymore. They're information. They tell you something happened. Somebody was here. When output becomes abundant, the origin becomes interesting. That's provenance. And I think provenance is going to matter a lot more than we realize. Think about music. Imagine AI can create the perfect song for you. Not a pretty good song, but the perfect one. Your favorite voice, perfect tempo, perfect genre, perfect lyrics, exactly the emotional tone you want at exactly that moment, generated instantly, infinitely that's incredible. But does that make watching somebody play a guitar in a room with 50 people worthless? I don't think so. Maybe it does the opposite because that performance happened once. That musician was actually standing there. You were actually standing there. Maybe they missed the note. Maybe the string broke. Maybe somebody yelled some stupid shit from the back of the room. It wasn't technically perfect, but it happened. There's a history attached to it. Sports is the same way. Maybe someday we could build machines that run faster, throw harder, react quicker, and execute plays better than any human being live, okay? Then why wouldn't we just watch robots play football? Because that's not the fucking point. We care because a human can fail. A human can choke. A human gets tired. A human gets hurt. A human can do something nobody thought they could do. There's risk. There's history. There's emotion. There's somebody on the other end of it. The output isn't the whole product. The human is part of the product. And that brings me to something a little uncomfortable. I use AI to make the bridge memos. So are these actually human made? Well, I think they are. But that raises a really important question because the bridge memos are not made without AI. Not even close, I use AI constantly. I'll be driving around or sitting somewhere and some idea gets stuck in my head. So I pull out my phone. I talk, I ramble, I repeat myself. I get down completely useless rabbit holes. I turn that into a transcript. Then I bring it into AI. We start working through it, organizing it, challenging it, finding holes, connecting it to something I said months ago, sometimes years ago. If I get something back and say, no, that's not fucking right, and we go again. There are other AI tools that are involved in this too. Research, signals, publishing, metadata, captions, editing, shorts, all kinds of shit. So what does human made actually mean in a world where humans use AI? Because I don't think the answer can be no machine touched it, that would be ridiculous. For example, a carpenter uses the saw. A photographer uses a camera, a filmmaker uses editing software, a musician, uses an amplifier, a writer, uses a word processor. Sir, humans have always used tools. So maybe the real question isn't, was AI involved? Maybe the question is, where did the human intention come from? Who decided the thing should exist? Who decided that it was supposed, what it was supposed to mean? Who made the choices? Who changed their mind? Who rejected something? Who made the final decision? Who's willing to put their fucking name on it? Who's accountable for the finished thing? Was there actually a person behind it? Because I think there's a difference between, I made something using AI and I asked AI to make something. I don't know exactly where that line is. We're gonna argue about that for years. Maybe there isn't one clean line. Maybe it eventually looks something like human made or AI assisted, AI generated, or unknown. But even that probably isn't enough because once being human becomes valuable, people are going to fake that too. Of course they are. AI generated handwritten notes, fake behind the scenes videos, fake workshops, fake artisans, fake human mistakes, intentionally inserted into things so they feel authentic. Fake creators with fake histories. The machine will learn the aesthetics of humanity. So making something look rough won't prove shit. Putting human made on a label won't prove shit, which means we probably need something deeper, a trail, history, trust, provenance. And this actually happened to me recently. I was working on a thumbnail for one of these memos. I gave AI an actual photograph of me and it gave me back some random guy. He kinda looked like me, better beard, different hat, different pose, probably more photogenic and my reaction was basically, who the hell is that guy? Cause I didn't want the improved version. I wanted me, I leave the wrinkles, leave the scraggly beard, leave the stupid expression, leave whatever is wrong with the picture because I'm the person who actually recorded the fucking thing. And AI had technically improved the artifact while removing the part that I actually cared about. That it was real. And that's when I realized image itself isn't necessarily the provenance. The provenance might be the trail, the original picture, the version AI made me rejecting it, the reason I rejected it, the conversation, the final choice, the recording, the transcript, the timestamp, the whole messy process. Maybe provenance isn't just a stamp that says human made. Maybe provenance is the trail of decisions, revisions, mistakes, arguments and intent that proves a human was actually there. That's part of why unzapped now exists the way that it does. The finished memo is there. The recording is there, the transcripts come from the actual recording, the dates are there, the sources are there, and if five years from now, I turn out to be a completely fucking wrong about something. I don't want to quietly rewrite the old memo, add an update, say what happened? Say I was wrong. Because the wrong idea is part of the record too. Otherwise, it isn't provenance, it's marketing. There's another piece of human made that I can't stop thinking about. AI might not be making us dumber. It might be moving humans from how toward why. I've actually been thinking about some version of this since before a generative AI really took off. I don't know back in 2019, I recorded this idea that my phone had basically become the third little of my brain, external memory, external knowledge, something sitting next to me all the time that made me capable of knowing things that I could never possibly fit inside my head. And if you really think about human history, we've been doing this for a long time. For most of human history, what you could do was tied pretty closely to what you personally knew, like the blacksmith knew how to work metal, the carpenter knew how to build, somebody knew how to sew, somebody knew how to butcher, somebody knew how to farm. You could get extremely good at your thing, but knowledge was always heavily attached to people then we started pulling knowledge out of the human brain with writing and books. The printing press libraries, indexes, microfiche, computers, the internet, search. Every one of those moved more of civilization's memory somewhere outside of one finite human brain. And I don't think that made us dumber. I think that made us more capable. I don't have to personally remember every fact. I can read the book. I don't need every book in my house. I can go to the library. I don't need to know where every piece of information lives. I can search. Then now AI just put that whole idea on fucking steroids. Because I don't even necessarily know how to find the information anymore. I could explain what I'm trying to accomplish. I can ask a question. I can reason with it, challenge it, ask another question. Have it show me another angle. So maybe AI isn't making human stupid. Maybe it's the next part of a transition that's been happening for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. Technology keeps eating pieces of the how. How do I make this? How do I calculate this? How do I find this? How do I code this? How do I organize this? How do I get from here to there? And that doesn't necessarily leave humans with nothing. It may leave us with some of the most important questions there are. Why are we making it? What should we make? What problem are we actually solving? What matters? Which answer do I trust? What tradeoff am I willing to make? What shouldn't we do? Maybe the machine becomes unbelievably good at telling us how and the human contribution moves higher up the stack toward intention, judgment, taste, meaning, why? And when I think about how this memo itself was made, that's pretty much what happened. These ideas came out of my head. Some of them have been sitting there for years. I dump them out. AI helped organize them. It helped me connect things. It helped me turn those ideas into something that hopefully makes sense when I say it out loud. The AI helped me with a shitload of the how. But I'm still sitting here deciding, why am I saying this? Do I actually believe it? Is that really what I mean? And ultimately, am I willing to sit in front of a camera and put my name on it? That's why I think this script is human-made, not because AI stayed away from it because the human was still responsible for the intention. At least I think that's the line I don't know. And there's a dependency buried in this too. If my third load becomes responsible for more and more of my how, what happens if I lose access to it? That doesn't necessarily mean I got dumber. It might mean I became less self-contained. Human beings have been doing that forever too. Most of us can't grow all of our own food, build our houses, forge our tools, make our own clothes, generate our own electricity, treat every disease. We became enormously more capable by building systems of dependency. AI may be able to do the same thing to cognition. And we've already talked about dependencies in this series. Dependencies are vulnerability. So maybe the question isn't whether AI makes us smarter or dumber. Maybe it's whether we use external intelligence to expand our reasoning or whether we slowly outsource so much judgment that we can't tell when the third load is feeding us bullshit. Maybe there's a difference between having intelligence available and actually understanding what you're doing with it. That probably matters and I don't have the answer yet, but if technology keeps eating the how, I think protecting the why becomes pretty fucking important. Maybe human-made isn't about whether human hands touch something. Maybe it's whether there are still a human mind behind it. Human intention, human judgment, human accountability. Somebody who actually meant something and once you start thinking about human-made that way, the idea gets much bigger than objects because a table can be human-made. A song can be human-made, a video can be human-made, but maybe the most important things humans make aren't things at all. Maybe their relationships. A friendship is human-made, a family is human-made. Trust between two people is human-made. A community is human-made. A night around the table with people you care about is human-made and every single one of those has something in common with the table that somebody built. They require human time, actual time. You cannot generate a 20-year friendship in five seconds. You can probably eventually generate something that looks like one and I could know everything about me. It could know what I like, know what I hate, know every conversation I've ever had. Talk to me like somebody I've known forever, but knowing everything about somebody and having spent 20 years with somebody are not the same thing. The time itself is part of the provenance. And that got me thinking about another bridge. Maybe social media exists because we stopped having enough time for real human connection. I don't mean that Facebook sucks. Everybody delete your account. No, that's lazy. Facebook solved a real human problem. Instagram solved a real human problem. Social platforms solved a real human problem. Connection. We want to know what the people we care about are doing. We are so nosy. We want to see the kids, the birthday, the vacation, the new house, watch the kids football stream. The stupid shit our friends are doing. Your grandparents live in Florida, you're in New York. They still want to see their grandkids grow up. People move, families spread out. Both people in the household work now. Everybody's running around trying to pay for the house, the car, the electricity, insurance, food, phones, and all the other bullshit and somewhere inside of all of that, we still need people. The real human connection is very expensive. Not necessarily in dollars, but in time. Driving somewhere takes time. Dinner takes time. Sitting around somebody's house takes time. A real conversation takes time. A relationship takes a shitload of time. And most of us feel like we don't have enough of it. You don't have three hours to spend with somebody. Here's 30 seconds, here's a picture, here's a birthday, here's a vacation, here's what the kids did today. Here's what they ate, here's what they think about politics. Scrolls, scrolls, scrolls, scrolls. Connection compressed into information. And honestly, that's incredibly useful. Social media lets us maintain pieces of relationships that geography and the rest of our lives might otherwise destroy. That's real. But there's a strange problem with that bridge. The technology that helped us maintain a human connection because we didn't have enough time, started consuming the little bit we had left. Think about that for a minute. We're too busy for the slow version of connection, so we built an efficient version. Then the efficient version became really fucking good at taking all of our attention. Social media did both. It gave us a little piece of human connection we genuinely crave while taking some of the finite resource required for the deeper version. Time. And I think that might be one of the biggest ideas hiding underneath this entire season. There's one thing I don't think technology can ever make abundant your time. In the last memo I said, technology trades technology for time. That's what we've been doing forever. Build the washing machine so somebody doesn't spend hours washing clothes. Build the tractor. Build the automobile. Build the computer. Build the software. Build the AI. Build the robots. Again and again and again. Take something a human has to spend time doing and build technology that gives some of that time back. Here's the weird part. The technology saves time, and we keep fighting new ways to spend it. Usually on more work. More obligations. More consumption. More bullshit. More scrolling. And our economy still requires most people to sell huge chunks of their finite time just to maintain their existence. So maybe we haven't experienced the payoff yet. What happens if that changes? What happens if some of what we talked about in memo six actually works? Automation AI, robots, cheaper production, cheaper transportation, less human labor required to keep machinery running and people get control over a little more of their time. What do humans actually do with it? I don't know. And I don't want to romanticize this. Maybe we use every reclaim second starting at infinitely generated synthetic content until our brains melt. That is absolutely an option. Technology can return time. It can't decide what we choose to do with it. That's on us. But I keep coming back to something much simpler. Maybe we actually want other people. Maybe we want to go to more concerts. More comedy shows. More dinners. More barbecues. Maybe somebody makes furniture because they like making furniture. Maybe somebody grows vegetables because they really enjoy it. Maybe somebody cooks even though a machine could technically cook it better. Maybe you drive over and see your family instead of just liking picture. Maybe you don't need to watch the video from the barbecue that you wished you were at because you were actually now at the barbecue. It doesn't mean technology disappears, but maybe the opposite. Maybe the technology gets vastly more sophisticated underneath all of this. AI, energy, transportation, automation, communication, all the machinery, but instead of becoming the experience, maybe it starts serving. The experience. Maybe it moves underneath human life. And if that happens, maybe the layer above the technology starts looking strangely human again. Making things. Growing things. Cooking things. Going places. Knowing people. Trading time. Building relationships. Actually being somewhere. And I keep coming back to something I've said to my kids for years. Make today the best day ever. It's kind of a stupid little line. But if you really think about it, it's a question about time. How much of today do you actually control? You have to sleep. You have to work. You have bills. Responsibilities. Things you simply have to do. And whatever is left, that's your life. Not someday. Not retirement. Today. And if technology eventually removes some of those requirements, maybe the biggest gift isn't cheaper stuff. Maybe it's getting more of our own life back. You cannot manufacture another Tuesday with your kids. You can make more computers. More robots. More energy. More images. More music. More software. More money for that matter. But you cannot regenerate the afternoon you didn't use. You cannot add another year on to somebody's life because they spent one staring at a screen. Human time is finite. That means when the output becomes abundant, the things made out of human time might become more valuable. Back to human made. A handmade object. A performance. A conversation. A friendship. A community. A place where people gather. A life. Maybe that's what human made really means. Not some little sticker on a product. Maybe it means a human was here. A human intended this. A human understood it. A human decided. A human spent some of the only resource they can never replace. Their time. If technology really does start giving us some of that time back, then where we spend time starts to matter. Who we spend it with starts to matter. What we make starts to matter. What we do when somebody requires us to do anything starts to matter. And suddenly a house isn't just where you sleep so you can wake up and go back to work tomorrow. A neighborhood isn't just proximity to a job. A town isn't just infrastructure. A table isn't just furniture. Those things become places where humans' time turns into humans' life. And I think that's where the next bridge goes, because if the digital world becomes incredibly abundant, if intelligence follows us everywhere, if work becomes less tied to a place, if technology layer starts moving quietly underneath everything instead of demanding that we constantly stare at it, then maybe the physical world around us becomes more important. Your home. Your land. Your neighborhood. Your workshop. Your kitchen. Your backyard. Your community. The people sitting around your table, maybe one of the strangest outcomes of an unbelievably technological future, is that the things we end up valuing most, look almost primitive. A place, a table, something somebody made, some foods and time, and some actual human beings sitting around it. Maybe the technology is finally doing what it's supposed to do all along, serving the human and not the other way around. I don't know where this bridge goes, but I think it's worth finding out. Goodbye.