Updated: Jul 5
I see technological progress as paradoxical in the creative professions. On the surface, better tools make better work. A ruler straightens our lines. Software expands our control. Cameras capture detail with fidelity once unimaginable. This is the rhythm of innovation: each new tool unlocks sharper articulation, smoother workflows, faster outcomes. And yet, the work doesn’t disappear—it shifts. Mastery still requires time and friction, just redirected. The learning curve may be shorter, but it still demands the climb.
It took Ira Glass, creator of This American Life, years to develop the storytelling voice he imagined. As he describes it, the gap between your taste and your ability only closes through sheer volume—by making and remaking until something finally aligns. For many, he admits, that gap never fully closes.
The same is true across art and design history. Remarkable work was often the result of deep time—craft honed through focus, frustration, and repetition. This is the essence of the 10,000 hours: not just effort, but intention sustained over time. But in a culture of instant output, that kind of slow mastery is becoming rare.
What happens when technology compresses the time it takes to do something extraordinary?
When Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine, his answer was, “Could you patent the sun?” It took him 7 years to make the vaccine. The vaccine transformed polio from a terrifying, paralyzing disease into one that could be prevented with a simple injection. By refusing to profit from it, he reshaped how the world viewed medicine, not just as a field of discovery, but as a force for equity and compassion.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, AI helped identify viable vaccine candidates, simulate immune responses, and optimize clinical trial designs. What once took 5–10 years for traditional vaccine development was compressed into under a year.
What happens to the value when it’s no longer so out of reach for many?
If you remember your design history, Modernists attempted to democratize "good taste," but something unexpected happened when they did. Access to good taste came at the cost of individuality.
For example, Helvetica’s rise to global popularity turned the typeface into a symbol of modernity, neutrality, and—paradoxically—visual sameness. Its neutrality, once a strength, became a default aesthetic; a safe, impersonal choice.
Much like Helvetica in the 20th century, today’s algorithm-favoured aesthetics are forging a new kind of sameness—clean, legible, and endlessly forgettable.
The tools we use today allow nearly anyone with taste and intention to design what used to require years of technical mastery. Traditionally, technical skill is often a proxy for value—the sheer ability to translate vision into form conferred authority. Now that our tools can erase that friction, less hard skillls are required to achieve sophisticated production.
Suddenly, the field is saturated with visually “brilliant” work. The bar for remarkability is shifting—not upward or downward, but sideways into the realm of narrative and meaning. What once took 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can now be approximated in seconds.
So then… what happens to remarkability?
For years, we’ve defaulted to the notion that “good things take time” and “practice makes perfect”, but now, maybe it’s different. Anu Atluru recommends we “Make Something Heavy”. She writes, “We’re creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.” In a world where tools can generate beauty on command, the challenge isn’t making—it’s making something that matters.
Maybe it’s not execution that distinguishes the remarkable now, but rather conviction. A sense that behind the pixels lies a person who chose, resisted, reconsidered, and cared. In which case, what gives work its gravity begins to orbit around ideas, not execution. If anyone can make beautiful things, what sets your work apart might not be how it's made—but why.
Food for thought
