When the Computer Got Faster Than Us

Slow Down

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And why AI might finally slow us back down.

There was a time when running a process meant you could go make a sandwich.

Back in the day, computing was slow. You’d start a program, watch the progress bar crawl, maybe hear the hard drive click like a heartbeat, and then… you waited. Compiling code? Go grab lunch. Rendering a video? See you in the morning. Early computing was a Zen garden of patience and progress wheels.

Then we got impatient.We wanted faster chips, shorter waits, instant everything.

So we got what we asked for.

Computers got faster — exponentially faster. Load times vanished, refresh rates soared, and suddenly we were the ones struggling to keep up. The machines weren’t waiting on us anymore; we were waiting on the next ping, the next alert, the next thing demanding our attention.

The irony is painful and poetic: computers did make everything faster — including us. We used to measure productivity in output. Now we measure it in context switches. And that’s where the quiet burnout began. We adapted to the computer’s tempo. Our workdays turned into cognitive juggling acts — a hundred tabs open, three chats going, five apps updating, a notification symphony blaring in the background.

We didn’t speed up technology. We let technology speed up us.

Then Came the Machines That Don’t Need Babysitters

AI, oddly enough, might be our first off-ramp.

When I kick off an AI process — generating twenty pages of code, analyzing a dataset, summarizing research — I don’t have to sit and watch. I could monitor the logs if I wanted to, but I don’t need to. It’s working out there in the digital ether, asynchronously, invisibly, at its own machine pace.

For the first time in decades, the computer doesn’t need constant supervision.

We’ve come full circle.The waiting is back — but this time, it’s a gift.

Back then, waiting was a bottleneck. Now it’s a breath.

AI is re-introducing space between the doing and the done. It’s quietly saying,

“Hey, I got this. You go be human for a bit.”

Maybe that’s the most radical upgrade yet — not faster output, but reclaimed presence.

Fight the Urge to Max Out the Machine

Here’s the trap: once you realize how much horsepower you’ve got, the instinct is to use all of it.

“Sure, I could open another tab. Fire off another process. Spin up one more project.”

And technically, yes — you can. But should you? Probably not. You’re already running at 30x your previous output thanks to these tools. There’s no medal for wringing 31x out of it. The law of diminishing returns applies — not just to compute cycles, but to human cognition.

AI doesn’t need you to keep your foot on the gas. It needs you to steer.

Let the tools do what they’re built for, and resist the reflex to fill every moment of idle capacity. That space — that pause — is where you get clarity, perspective, and all the things the machine can’t generate.

When the AI’s working, don’t. When it’s generating, regenerate.

Reclaim the Human Interface

Use your standing desk.Pace the room while it compiles.Get a basketball hoop for your trash can. And seriously — stop typing to the computer like you’re its intern. Talk to it. Every major OS, every AI platform, every mobile device already supports full voice input. Use it. Reclaim the interface that was always meant to be natural.

You’re not an endpoint. You’re the operator. The orchestrator. The human in the loop — not the loop itself.

We built machines smart enough to do the machine work.Maybe the real revolution is remembering how to be human again.

The future of computing isn’t about making machines more human — it’s about giving humans permission to stop pretending to be machines.

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