Achievement has nothing on ambition, and the new almost always disappoints the imagination.

I have heard it said that AI is “the last invention” — that when you invent something that itself can invent, it ends the entire phenomenon of human innovation. On its face, this seems impossible. All of human history is a sequence of invention. We have an idea, we make a thing, we use it to make the world around us different, living in that world gives us another idea, and so on. It’s almost inconceivable that this sequence could end.

But there’s a difference between something being impossible and impossible to understand. Perhaps AI could be “the last invention.” It would have to be the sort of AI that gives way to a completely “post-human” future — a world not only made by machines, but dominated by them. The very categories we use to think about innovation, progress, and invention might themselves be relics of a human-centered worldview that won’t survive contact with whatever comes next. As much as we like to think ourselves capable of thought that breaks the boundaries of experience, now is as good a time as any to humbly assess the reach — and accuracy — of our imagination, we fish, contemplating the shore from beneath the waves.

For now, though, AI is one of a series of technologies made by humans. And when we make a new technology, it tends to create a moment in time that is rife with tension: The illusion of arrival at the future’s doorstep sends a culture scrambling to gather consensus around how to go through it, only to quickly dissolve into a new present, with many more doors, none of which anyone was prepared for.

Ironically, that’s when we all begin to look backward.

People of a certain age have experienced this several times over.

When the compact disc arrived in the early 1980s, it was marketed as the perfection of sound recording and playback: No hiss, no crackle, no degradation. All the limitations of vinyl, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes had been overcome. And for a while, it felt like an arrival — like we had reached the end of the line for music technology. Of course, we hadn’t.

Just as CDs overtook cassette tapes, they gave way to MP3s and streaming. And just as that happened, people started collecting vinyl records again. What began as a niche eventually rose to a level that now exceeds its first run — when vinyl was all we had! This isn’t because vinyl sounds better; by any objective measure, it doesn’t. It’s because in a world of nearly infinite choice and access, the limits of a record have a renewed appeal. Nothing engages the imagination better than limits.

The same pattern played out with photography. Digital cameras promised perfect images — infinite shots, immediate feedback, no grain, no unpredictability. And yet, as digital photography became the norm, film photography experienced a renaissance. Not because it was more convenient or more accurate, but because its limits created room for imagination. The anticipation of not knowing what you’d captured until the roll was developed, the grain that suggested texture and depth, the way light leaked and colors shifted — these were not the gaps, but the territory.

Technological nostalgia is often written off as an affectation at best or Luddism at worst. But I think it’s neither. I think it is the memory of imagination. The limits of an outmoded technology — the static of a record, the grainy texture of film, the disconnected completeness of a single disc, tape, or cartridge — engaged our imagination. They provided a boundary past which our hearts yearned and our minds wondered. The technology wasn’t finished, and so neither were we.

But when a new boundary is reached, the excitement of the new is surprisingly fleeting. The wonder of all the music in the world stales quickly. Infinite choice begins to feel like no choice at all. We start to miss limits and grasp around the known. We curate playlists to simulate the constraints of albums. We seek out lo-fi aesthetics to recreate the imperfections we once tried to eliminate.

Achievement, it turns out, has nothing on ambition. And the new almost always disappoints the imagination.

That’s why innovation will never end. The human heart cannot tolerate completion. It thrives on anticipation and constructs an economy of permanent speculation. Only in the heart is the promise worth more than the present.

This is what makes me skeptical of the “last invention” thesis. Not because I don’t think AI is powerful or transformative — it clearly is. But because the pattern suggests something else entirely. AI, like every technology before it, will create its own moment of tension. It will feel like arrival for a while. We’ll believe we’ve reached some endpoint, some final solution to the problem of making things. And then, inevitably, we’ll start to miss what came before.

I can already imagine the nostalgia for the first AI experiences — from the fluid cartoonishness of Will Smith eating spaghetti to those bits of media that already feel, today, as real as real. Tomorrow we’ll look back and think ourselves naive, if not blind for buying any of the slop. We’ll remember when AI-generated images had that telltale glossiness, when the hands were always wrong, when the text was gibberish. Someone will love and collect and curate those early artifacts. Not because they were better, but because they were incomplete. Because they are beacons for the imagination.

And more than that, I think we’ll invent new things in response to AI. Not just improvements on AI itself, but entirely new categories of making and thinking that we can’t yet imagine. The way digital photography didn’t just replace film but created new forms of visual culture — social media, smartphone photography, real-time documentation. The way the internet didn’t just digitize existing media but created entirely new modes of communication and connection that no one predicted.

Every technology creates the conditions for the next technology, yes. But it also creates conditions for things that aren’t technologies at all. New forms of art, new social arrangements, new ways of being human in response to the non-human. The more powerful our tools become, the more we seem to want to assert what makes us distinct from them. The more we automate, the more we value the handmade. The more we optimize, the more we crave the inefficient and the imperfect.

The real threat of AI as “the last invention” isn’t that it will actually end human innovation and put us all out to pasture in a withering culture of leisure, but that we’ll believe it will. That we’ll internalize the narrative of our own obsolescence and stop trying. That we’ll mistake the tool for the maker and forget that the heart that yearns past the boundary is what drives everything forward.

If there’s one thing human history has shown us, it’s that we are spectacularly bad at staying satisfied. We reach the summit and immediately start looking for the next mountain. We solve a problem and invent ten new ones in its place. We create tools that do exactly what we wanted, and then we start wanting something else entirely. As a believer in the wisdom of finding contentment, I don’t see this as always a good thing. But it is who we are, for better and for worse.

2025-11-10 Filed under: Essays