I build with AI because I want it to take work off people’s plates. I want the time back, including my own.
I want a conversation without a notification competing with the person in front of me. I want to make something with my hands without turning it into content. That is the analog life I want more of. Children need room for it, but so do adults.
The trouble is that a faster tool doesn’t necessarily give anyone more time to live.
In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow describes what happens when that relationship goes wrong:
A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.
Doctorow distinguishes choosing a tool to help with your work from being made to keep up with an automated system. The question is who gets to set the pace and decide how the tool is used.
That distinction matters to what I’m building for small teams. Imagine an AI tool that drafts a client handoff. The person responsible can check its sources, correct the draft and decide when it is ready. That could remove work. But if the tool sends the handoff automatically and leaves the person to repair whatever it got wrong, generating it faster proves very little. We still have to count the cleanup.
Even when a tool does save time, someone can fill the gap with more assignments. A team that finishes sooner should have some say in what happens next. Otherwise, “productivity” can become a polite word for a pace nobody agreed to.
Outside work, I see a related struggle over who gets to decide when we are finished.
Meta tells investors: “We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising.” Its 2025 annual report explains that advertisers pay for impressions or actions such as clicks. Extra time in the Instagram feed creates more opportunities to show ads. I can leave wishing I had spent that time elsewhere, and the visit can still have served the business.
Telling people to exercise more willpower leaves the business model out of the conversation. I want technology that helps me do what I came for and treats leaving as an acceptable outcome.
For children, that also means adults making room for a life beyond the phone. Unplugged Canada brings families together around delaying smartphones and social media. I care about that shared effort. A parent should not have to work through every pressure alone. I want the unrecorded afternoon to remain an ordinary part of growing up.
And I want some of those afternoons myself. Making something slowly, or being with someone without dividing my attention, deserves a place in the day before the inbox is empty.
I still want to meet people through LinkedIn and grow an audience for my work. I can want that without turning every part of life into material for it.
Before adding the next AI tool, ask what work it will remove and who gets to decide what happens to the time it saves. Include the checking and cleanup. Then choose something away from the screen that you want that time for.