Before the holiday break, I enjoyed writing a series on Lateral Thinking and AI. How new tools change not just what we can do, but how we see. That inquiry led me somewhere I didn’t quite expect.
Not aimed at the next breakthrough. Not aimed at the next disruption. But toward a calmer, more human question.
What becomes more valuable once artificial intelligence does its obvious work?
That question is the starting point for a new Make Anything Thursday series I’m calling After AI.
This is not a series about AI
At least, not in the usual sense. Plenty of smart people are focused on what AI will automate, replace, or accelerate next. That work matters. But it’s only half the story.
The more interesting half comes after. After productivity spikes. After content becomes cheap and abundant. After pattern recognition, generation, and simulation are no longer scarce.
When that happens, value doesn’t disappear. It shifts.
What shifts into focus
As AI accelerates production and removes friction, certain human qualities quietly rise in importance:
- Presence
- Judgment
- Care
- Taste
- Attention
And experiences that require humans, time, and shared commitment. This isn’t speculation. You can already see it happening.
- Live experiences matter more than digital ones.
- Scarcity commands attention where abundance does not.
- People travel farther, pay more, and commit deeper for moments that can’t be replayed or replicated.
Not despite the friction, but because of it.
Why this series, and why now
After AI is an attempt to notice these shifts while they’re still forming. Across this series, I’ll explore domains where AI is advancing fastest and where human judgment still carries disproportionate weight:
- Live experience and experiential travel
- Medicine, where diagnosis scales but care does not
- Design, where options are infinite but taste still chooses
- Leadership, where presence increasingly beats PowerPoint
- And the emerging premium on scarcity, craft, and care
I’m less interested in forecasting than in observing. Less interested in tools than in consequences.
A simpler, older question
Each essay in this series returns to the same underlying inquiry:
What still matters when speed, scale, and efficiency stop being the point?
It’s an old question, dressed in new clothes.
What’s coming next
Today’s post sets the frame. In the weeks that follow, I’ll drill into each of these areas, starting with live experience, and why one business leader recently described it as the anti-AI bet.
