My daughter expects items to arrive from the “Amazon truck” on demand. It’s not magic to her; it’s just how the world works. As a child, I recall the pre-household internet, and later the excitement of dial -up, an era of patience and progress bars, but I also took cars and central cooling/heating for granted. What we grow up with sets the floor, not the ceiling. It’s our starting point, the foundation that allows us to imagine what comes next.
Technology, in many ways, is a ladder. Each rung we stand on lets us see a little farther ahead. When we no longer worry about basic transportation, we dream of self-driving cars. When we can access all the world’s music in a tap, we start to wonder why our thoughts can’t be transcribed effortlessly too. The moment a technology is embedded into daily life, it stops feeling like an achievement and starts feeling like an expectation.
It’s a give and take. We gain access, but we lose some sense of wonder. We take for granted what once felt like magic. But there’s an upside, because when something becomes second nature, it frees up our cognitive bandwidth to expect even more. When basic needs are met, we can dream beyond them. Just as Maslow’s hierarchy suggests, once we climb past survival, we start reaching for creativity, fulfillment, and self-actualization.
AI, in many ways, is another rung. My daughter might grow up with the expectation that any question she has can be answered instantly in digestible, conversational form. That’s not something I grew up with, but it’s already something I take for granted. What happens when we push past that? When we no longer just expect knowledge at our fingertips, but insight, wisdom, even action?
The tools we grow up with wire our expectations. But they also shape the future we will build next…
