Imagine a wooded landscape. A man, mud and clay applied in lines to his face and torso, grunts and howls as he smashes two rocks together over a pile of dried grass. Twigs stick out from around the edges. A spark flies off the flint and ignites the kindling into a small blaze. The man jumps back in wonder and those around him chant in excitement. “This. Changes. Everything.” The discovery of how to make fire. That promethean achievement, humankind’s first technology, set our species on the course to becoming what we are today. The awe it must have sparked in early humans…I wonder at what point it became just something to cook over.
Fire was the first in a pattern that would emerge over the next millennia. Every technology since has followed a similar arc. Something new arrives and upends life as we know it. It is met with astonishment and often apprehension. A small group adopts it and explores its possibilities. Then, as the technology proves its value, more and more people pick it up and it is absorbed into daily ritual. At which point it becomes invisible. It becomes a commodity. It becomes infrastructure. No matter how wondrous or powerful the technology, at some point it is just another tool, just like fire on a stove.
I point this out because Generative AI has moved quickly through this pattern and is well on its way to becoming invisible. I use it hours a day, going back and forth with a chatbot like I do with any other application. It isn’t the first time. I’ve spent most of my professional career in one app or another. Some enterprise software hosted in the cloud. My productivity tied to a server farm in some rural part of the country. I login, I work across systems and tools and don’t give it a second thought. Of course generative AI would follow suit, no matter how loud the hype. And what once felt like a parlor trick, “write me a sonnet about a cat,” charming with a hint of awe, is now as common as opening an excel spreadsheet. It is what humans do, we invent, we adopt, we integrate. No more sparkle, no more shine.
Some may look at this integration as a flaw. A lack of gratitude. The lament is familiar and usually delivered from an older generation to a younger: “You don’t know how good you have it. In my day we did this by hand.” But I think that lament misreads what is actually happening. The younger generation isn’t ungrateful. They have simply done what humans have always done: absorbed the miracle so completely that it disappeared into the background of daily life. And that disappearing act is not a failure of appreciation. It is the mechanism working exactly as it should. Because a generation that no longer has to think about the last miracle is free to reach for the next one. Our ability to make the magical mundane is not a flaw. It is a feature and our greatest advantage. It is what forces us, generation after generation, to birth new miracles.
I am not the first person to notice this pattern. Marcel Proust, writing in the early 20th century, watched it happen to his own era’s miracles in real time. The telephone, the automobile, the electric light, they all arrived in his lifetime wearing the same aura of the impossible. He captured this exact moment of wonder-into-habit, in The Captive, The Fugitive he writes:
“And I would go down almost without thinking how extraordinary it was that I should be calling upon that mysterious Mme de Guermantes of my boyhood simply in order to make use of her for a practical purpose, as one makes use of the telephone, a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream.”
A supernatural instrument, now used to order ice cream. Proust saw the pattern clearly a century before I was tossing an iPad in my briefcase or shouting for Alexa to turn on my bedside fan.
In many ways Proust got this exactly right. And he saw it operating not just in technology but in people, in the way we ourselves harden over time into fixed patterns, settled preferences, permanent arrangements. He wrote about it in the character of Swann, a man of taste and possibility who loses his captivating qualities and transforms into something more rigid, no longer reaching outward but instead extracting, as Proust puts it, “a fixed residue of habits, of passions they might consider as characteristic and permanent” and arranging his entire life around protecting them. Swann loses the glimmer of curiosity and retreats to the known. He calcifies. The wonder fades, the faculties go dormant, and most of us, most of the time, live at a reduced version of ourselves. We rely on habit to handle what attention used to. This is the cost of integration, in a person and in a technology alike. Proust was right about all of it.
However, I want to follow Proust’s observation one step further. Proust saw the calcification and called it an anaesthetic. I want to call it a foundation. Because calcified ground is solid ground, and solid ground is what you build the next thing on. The server farms and enterprise software, the cloud I log into without thinking, the tools I use without noticing. That invisible infrastructure, the thing that became so mundane I stopped seeing it, is the very ground that Generative AI was built on. The internet had to become invisible before AI could emerge from it. The miracle had to become a commodity before it could become a substrate. This is not decline. This is the mechanism. Each generation of technology has to calcify before the next one can take root in it.
Because integration doesn’t eliminate all friction and often in reality reveals new friction. New gaps surface that the integrated technology can’t solve, and those gaps become the seed of the next innovation. The internet removed the friction of distance: you could reach anyone, find anything, instantly. But that very frictionlessness created new friction: too much information, no reliable way to navigate it. That friction produced the search engine. The search engine removed the friction of finding, but left the friction of reading, synthesizing, deciding. That friction, running on top of the now-invisible infrastructure of the internet and the cloud, produced Generative AI. The habit revealed the next problem. The anaesthetic wore off in a new place. And we reached, as we always do, for the next tool.
Which brings us back to right now. We are somewhere in the middle of that arc with AI. The astonishment phase is fading. The adoption phase is in full swing. The invisibility phase is already beginning. I see it in my own daily use, going back and forth with a chatbot without really registering the strangeness of it anymore. That apprehension that met AI when it first arrived, that met every technology when it first arrived, is not a sign something has gone wrong. It is the friction of integration. It is the growing pains of a technology finding its place in the infrastructure of human life. That integration is already laying the ground for something none of us can quite see yet.
What strikes me most about this pattern is not the technology. It is us. It is the fact that humans have done this over and over again. We’ve absorbed the impossible, made it mundane, and then used that foundation to birth something impossible again. It is the human advantage. The same finiteness that makes us valuable—the mortality, the singularity, the clock running down—is what drives this cycle. We don’t have infinite time to stay amazed. We integrate because we must. We build because we must. We move forward because the alternative is to stop, and stopping is the one thing a finite creature cannot afford to do. We turn the tools we’ve been given into the foundation for the next leap, refusing to let the past be simply lost.
This is what I find genuinely hopeful about the AI moment. Not the technology itself, but the pattern it belongs to. The disruption, the apprehension, the slow integration, the calcification. All of it is the cycle working exactly as it should. And at the end of this cycle, reliably, generation after generation, comes the next miracle. Is it AI agents? Is it quantum computing? Is it something yet to bubble up into public consciousness? Somewhere right now, while millions of us are opening AI chatbots without giving it a second thought, someone is striking two rocks together over a pile of dried leaves. Soon a new spark will ignite us all over again, and we’ll collectively marvel: This. Changes. Everything.