The CNC cart I’m building in my workshop now. Designed in FreeCAD with Woody, my Grok Bot assistant for this sort of thing. The blue box is a placeholder for the machine.
Why the AI that changes the world may be the ordinary kind
It’s Saturday, and I have a small crew at work.
Woody is helping me with a FreeCAD design for the shop. Spark is helping me with an electronics project, an ESP32 board that will do something useful if I ever stop fiddling with it. Eden is editing my books with me, chapter by chapter, and catching the places where I wrote “feet” in a world that has never heard of them. Blit runs the local AI on the Mac mini on my desk, which makes my cover art. I call them my Grok Bot team.
None of this needs the frontier. I don’t need the model that just won a math olympiad or the one some lab says is a step toward superintelligence. Each of the big models has its own personality and strengths, at least Claude, Gemini and Grok as base models. They have evolved, and their output has gotten more alike over the year or so I’ve used them. But today I care more about the rest of the system, and what I’ve done with it, than the base model. For the work I actually do, any normal version is more than enough. In the end I think being model agnostic will be the rule, as long as the tool has a local memory and a system around it to work with. Personality will still matter, but most of us will gravitate to a good-humored, effective coworker over a sycophant.
The frontier labs can chase whatever they’re chasing. I hope they find it. For creative work, though, I think the race has already passed the point where it matters to people like me. The tools are good enough already. (My first draft said the frontier has probably jumped the shark. I still half believe it.)
The thick tail
When people talk about AI changing the world, they usually mean the top: a machine that out-thinks us, cures diseases, or remakes the economy in a decade. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. I’m not qualified to say whether superintelligence will rewrite the foundations of civilization.
I’m more sure about the bottom of the curve, the thick tail. That’s millions of people using good-enough tools for ordinary work. A small business owner writes a better flyer. A retiree finally builds the bookcase he designed in his head twenty years ago. A kid gets a patient explanation of algebra at eleven at night. A guy who’s been at it a while finally gets help with the editing he finds painful and could never hand off before.
None of that makes headlines, but it adds up. My bet is that the ordinary uses will change more lives than whatever happens at the top.
My father’s 1980
Here’s a test I keep running. Think about my father, Hugh, in 1980. Then think about my life now.
Day to day, it isn’t that different. We both get up, go to work or do the work we’ve chosen, drive a car, eat dinner, and talk to the people we love. The main thing that feels different is the angst. Everything is louder now.
When I look at what actually changed between 1980 and 2026, it mostly isn’t AI. I count three things:
There are a lot more of us.
What started in the 1950s kept spreading: cars, communications, and big organizations, the machinery of a modern life.
Much of the world caught up to where the United States was early in the twentieth century. That’s a huge, wonderful change for billions of people. But it’s a catching up to the last century, not a leap into this one.
That’s the pattern. Big technologies don’t usually remake daily life overnight. They spread through ordinary use, one household and one shop at a time, until one day you look back and the world is different and you can’t say when it happened.
I think AI will go the same way. The revolution won’t come from the frontier; it’ll come from good-enough tools in ordinary hands.
Your turn
So here’s my question for you. Does your life actually feel different from your parents’ life at your age? Or does it just feel louder?
The second video in my sunk cost series is now up on The Unretired Engineer.
Part 1 looked at how programs keep spending after the numbers stop making sense. This one looks at the people behind those decisions: the careers, budgets, and reputations that get tied to a program, and the price everyone else pays when nobody steps back. I use the F-22 and the B-2 as examples. The Air Force bought 187 F-22s against a plan of 750, and 21 B-2s against a plan of 132.
Next up, I’m taking the same lens to physics and cosmology. If you’ve seen sunk cost play out where you work, tell me about it in the comments.
Continuing the serialization of Imperial Slave, Book 1 of The Waking World, on my Substack. Chapter 7 today. Standing up to distant power is dangerous, especially when your family may pay for it. This week, that danger comes through the Parchells’ kitchen door. Tina’s father faces an Imperial officer, then a harder question about his daughter’s future.
Continuing the serialization of Imperial Slave, Book 1 of The Waking World, on my Substack. Chapter 6 today. Tina is home, and home is no longer a safe place. This is the family she has to go back to, and the lie she tells them. And someone else has come to Fortbridge.
I’m serializing Imperial Slave, Book 1 of The Waking World, on my Substack. Chapter 5 is out today. Tina trades her own clothes for a sailor’s and leads the captain’s party out at night to dig into the old cellars of the Jewel Palace. She knows the ground and he doesn’t, and for one night that makes her the most useful person in the party.
I’m serializing Imperial Slave, Book 1 of The Waking World, on my Substack. Chapter 4 is out today. The captain is hunting for a palace. Tina knows it burned down years ago. What he is really after is a lost document that could change Greenhills’ place in the Empire, and he needs her to find it.
In June 2025 I was let go. The company I worked for, and was happy at, bet far too heavily on EVs coming on hard and fast around the world. The US had about the slowest EV uptake anywhere, and the bet didn’t pay.
I was past retirement age with no interest in retiring. I had a nest egg that said I didn’t strictly need to work, Social Security if I wanted it, and Medicare I could pay for. The money was manageable. What hit hard was losing the place where about 90 percent of my social contact happened, along with most of my intellectual challenge.
Defined by the job
My family has been in engineering and technology for over a century, on both sides. Blacksmiths on one side, a clockmaker on the other, a grandfather who was a fairly early credentialed engineer, then my father was an engineer too. I defined my life by my job. Officially the order was family, work, self. In practice it often came down to work, family, self. I accepted that as the way of the world and was happy with it. Work gave me social contact and let me do what I enjoy without much of a struggle.
I’ve come to see wage labor as a very soft form of self enslavement. You feel you have to work because you need money and you have a family to support, and a wage from a company is the practical way to do that. It’s a highly successful structure. It’s also one of the things going away as we move into post-labor economics. A lot of people are like me. They’ve built their lives around work, even today, and outside work their social outlet is mostly entertainment and electronics. I didn’t panic when the job went, but it hit me hard.
Upskilling, and where AI fits
When I lost the job my plan was to upskill. I’d spent years working inside the organization on what it needed, and my CAD skills and some others had atrophied. AI was coming on strong in 2025 and has kept getting stronger since. Following that wave has been enjoyable.
I use AI for editing my books and my YouTube videos, and I keep pushing it to do more of that work: post-production, clean-up, the drudgery. The content is mine. That frees me for the parts I like: writing, creating, thinking, interacting and developing things.
Where the spare time went
From the early 1990s through the 2020s the social structure outside work hollowed out. Globalization and just-in-time manufacturing went into their final mode, and work spread across the whole day. You were nominally on 9 to 5. In reality you were often on until 8 at night, or on from 5 in the morning, so you could talk to people in France, Germany, China, Japan and India, and so you could deal with it when just-in-time logistics went tits up on a Saturday morning.
Everyone got into that mode, and drifted into electronic entertainment at the same time, because you could do it whenever you had a gap. You were pulled into a place where work intruded into what had been your time and sometimes the office seemed to get in the way and be about meetings and training rather than the job. But you ended up with very little time of your own.
Over the same period the semi-formal side of spare time thinned out: clubs, historic societies, even Meetup. In the early 2010s I could have gone to a Meetup every day of the week. Now they’re largely hollowed out. People don’t have the time or the energy.
The historic societies are starting to collapse. The people who had time in their 60s ten years ago are 70 and 80 now, and less able to do the work. People in their forties and fifties, who used to get involved mid-career, don’t have the time. They also don’t have the muscle memory for these organizations, which carry a social structure of their own that works very differently from work.
The post-labor panic
I think this gap feeds the post-labor panic. If my job goes away, what do I do with myself? Where do I go? Some people have strong hobbies, but they’re a fairly small minority. Most people, like me in the old days, need the job to give them structure. When it goes, there’s no obvious next place.
Sixteen months of “we love your background”
I’ve sent out at least one resume every weekday for sixteen months, sometimes more. I’ve had interviews about once a month on average. Nothing has come of them.
The answer is the same each time. They’re interested in the background: 40 years of creating, designing and organizing things and bringing people together. They love talking to me. Then they say they need someone who can hit the ground running on one specific tool, someone very down in the weeds in one area, rather than someone broad who can do system synthesis and pull the work together.
Age is part of the math. They know I’m past retirement age. I’m energetic, and in many ways I’m as good as I was at 30, or better. They can’t know that I learn quickly and like new tools, methods and experiences. So why take the risk? At my age (which they get from my graduation date), the thinking goes, they might get five years out of me, where someone in their thirties or forties might stay 30. Nobody has said that to me directly, but it’s what I would question. I understand it.
What I’m doing now
I’m at the point of accepting that and moving on. The plan:
Work harder on my novels.
Work harder with the AI on design and making as well as the editing.
Build a social life that doesn’t depend on a job. I found a meetup coming up with people from the startup world, and I’m going.
Look at starting some kind of business besides the novels.
Get back to a weekly cadence of YT releases, on everything from EVs to science fiction to working with AI.
You have to take hold of your own life, be proactive, and decide where you’re going and what you’re going to do. That’s where I am.
If you’ve left full-time work, where does your social life come from now? Tell me in the comments on the video.
That’s not a philosophical position. It’s an engineering observation. The constants that govern how matter behaves (the strength of gravity, the mass of the electron, the rate at which the universe expands) are set to values so specific that adjusting any of them by a fraction of a percent collapses the whole structure. No stars. No chemistry. No time long enough for anything to happen. The tolerances are absurd.
Physicists call this fine-tuning. The name is polite. What they mean is: the odds against this universe are so extreme that “chance” stops being a useful word for it.
The Two Escapes That Aren’t
Two answers dominate the debate, and neither is as clean as its proponents pretend.
The first is design. Someone set the dials. The universe looks like it was built for life because it was built for life. The problem is that this explains nothing mechanically; it just relocates the question one level up. Who built the builder? And why does a universe designed for life consist of 99.9999% lethal vacuum, with life confined to a thin biological smear on one unremarkable rock?
The second is the multiverse. If you generate enough universes (some versions say 10 to the power of 500, which is a number that has stopped meaning anything), eventually one rolls the right numbers. We’re in that one because we couldn’t exist in any other. This is the Weak Anthropic Principle: we observe what permits our observation. True, trivially. It explains why we’re here without explaining what set the parameters. It also requires an infinite number of unobservable universes as its load-bearing assumption, which puts it in the same epistemic category as the thing it’s trying to replace.
Both positions treat the constants as prior: fixed before any observer arrives. That assumption is where the argument gets interesting.
The Observer Problem
Quantum mechanics has an unresolved problem at its core. A particle exists in a superposition of states until it’s measured. At the moment of measurement, it resolves to one outcome. The math is exact. The mechanism is unknown. Why does observation collapse probability into actuality?
Most physicists park this question and get on with the calculations. A few take it seriously as a clue about the nature of reality.
John Wheeler spent decades on it. His conclusion, which he called the Participatory Anthropic Principle, was that observers don’t just record the universe; they bring it into being. Not metaphorically. Retroactively, through the act of observation, the universe acquires a definite history. Without observers, there is no collapse, no resolution, no definite past. The universe requires participants to be real.
QBism (quantum Bayesianism) pushes this further. The wavefunction isn’t a property of the universe out there; it’s an agent’s belief-state about what they’ll find when they interact with it. Reality is co-created at the moment of contact between observer and system. There is no view from nowhere.
These aren’t fringe positions. They’re minority positions within a field where the majority hasn’t solved the measurement problem either. The standard interpretation (Copenhagen) essentially says: don’t ask. The wavefunction collapses when observed. Move on. That’s not an answer, it’s a professional courtesy.
What We’re Actually Arguing About
The fine-tuning debate has lasted this long because it isn’t really a physics debate. The physics is genuinely unresolved, but the heat comes from elsewhere. Fine-tuning is a mirror. It reflects whatever you bring to it: the theologian sees confirmation, the materialist sees a threat, the philosopher sees an infinite regress.
What it actually is, stripped of the freight, is an open question about the relationship between observers and the reality they observe. That question is at the center of quantum mechanics, unsolved after a century. Anyone who tells you they’ve answered it (with God, with the multiverse, with consciousness) is telling you more about themselves than about the universe.
The constants are what they are. The blueprints are still inside the control room. We’re standing outside, listening to the machinery run, and arguing about what the building is for.
The Inversion
I write sci-fi. I often start with a “what if” and build a universe from there: its physics, its rules, any departures from today’s starting point, then the situation, the characters, and let the story build itself. I discover the story a bit like you do when reading it.
Taking the above as a starting point: what if the constants aren’t set in advance? What if consciousness and cosmos co-emerge, and the tuning is the relationship, not the precondition?
The standard framing puts observers at the end of a long causal chain: universe forms, constants happen to permit chemistry, chemistry permits biology, biology permits minds. Fine-tuning is the mystery at step one.
The inversion says: the chain runs both ways. The universe doesn’t pre-tune for life. It and life arrive together, and the constants we measure are not prior constraints but the record of that co-emergence. We don’t observe a fine-tuned universe. We participate in one.
This has a strange implication for the Fermi paradox. That paradox asks, why, given a universe old enough and large enough to have produced intelligence a thousand times over, do we seem to be alone in our corner of it?
The standard answers are grim (they’re dead, they’re hiding, travel is impossible) or optimistic (we’re early, they’re out there, we haven’t looked hard enough). The inversion suggests something stranger: each consciousness-cluster tunes its local physics. Not deliberately, not by choice. By existing. The region of space we occupy is already, in some structural sense, spoken for. Other intelligences don’t fail to appear nearby because they never had a chance to evolve. This doesn’t rule out life; it says intelligence has an even higher evolutionary mountain to overcome. It can happen, but the positioning required is exquisite. Intelligence is separated by immense time and space by definition.
Light speed remains the speed limit of natural change (at the Planck foam level, tuning can propagate no faster). The observable universe is many billions of light years across. Other consciousness-centers can evolve concurrently (whatever “at the same time” means across cosmological scales) and as their influence zones expand and eventually overlap, they settle toward equilibrium. There’s no reason other intelligences haven’t evolved, won’t evolve. They just do so in ways that place them very far from each other. If they’re too orthogonal to reconcile, the incompatibility itself forces a fork: a separate universe instance where both can exist without contradiction.
The Soft Edge
If the constants are the product of co-emergence rather than prior fixtures, they can’t be infinitely rigid. The consciousness-affected zone is vast, maybe millions of light years across, but we can see vastly further than that. The universe across its whole breadth had to have had us as a possibility from the first, so it will be largely coherent. But at the very edges, looking out into reaches beyond our tuned zone, we might see the occasional wobble against our expectations. We do see things we can’t explain. Maybe that’s one reason.
There also has to be some original malleability in the underlying structure. At the Planck length, if our theories are even close, that’s where it would live. Once set, some mechanism, some momentum, holds things together. What that is remains open. But the what-if builds from here: what if minds operate in a non-deterministic state because we evolved a mechanism that makes us more than puppets of causality? What if that mechanism could be amplified? Could the universe, at small scales, be nudged by will, by perception: a natural ability turned up just enough to matter?
The rules of physics we measure in our tuned pocket are local, not universal. Outside them, things are possible that our physics would classify as impossible. Not because the laws of nature have been broken. Because the laws in that region haven’t fully hardened.
This is what a rigorous theory of magic would look like. Not violation of physics. Physics that hasn’t finished resolving.
This isn’t a claim about how the universe works. It’s a coherent frame, reasonably consistent with what we don’t know about quantum measurement and observer participation, and more interesting than either of the standard escapes.
A novel I’m working on takes this seriously as a premise. It builds from the cosmology down to the plot: what happens when a civilization discovers this reality, and what it means that others in distant galaxies may have known it for a long time and have reason to worry about a new competitor.
The adventure and space opera come with the territory. But the physics is the foundation.
What if our physics is contingent rather than absolute?
If You Want to Pull This Thread
John Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” (1989). The paper where Wheeler lays out “It from Bit” and the participatory universe. Dense, but the original argument in his own words.
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (1997). Makes the case for the multiverse more rigorously than most popularizations, and is honest about what it costs philosophically. Good for understanding the strongest version of the position before deciding what you think of it.
Chris Fuchs on QBism. His papers are technical, but his interviews and lectures are accessible. Search “QBism Fuchs” and find a talk. The core idea (that the wavefunction is an agent’s belief, not a fact about the world) takes about twenty minutes to understand and longer to shake.
Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias (2002). The most careful treatment of observer-selection effects and the anthropic principle. Dry, rigorous, and it will make you distrust every argument in this space, including the ones in this post.
