AI Is a Bridge

AI won’t make work less laborious. We’ll do more instead. But will it be for each other, or just for ourselves?

We’ll keep labouring over the details because that’s what other humans value. The craft, the choices, the effort — those aren’t going away. What AI could remove is the friction between how humans naturally express themselves and the structured digital systems we’ve built to fulfil our needs.

Today that friction is everywhere. Dropdown menus instead of plain speech. Forms instead of free text. Interfaces designed for computers, not people.

A couple of examples from my own recent building:

When I edit recipes in my meal planner at OurMeals, I type or speak in freeform — “halve the sugar, swap the tofu for chicken” — and the AI maps it back into the database so my grocery list stays accurate. No scrolling, no dropdowns, no structured fields. I can ask for instructions mid-recipe without even touching my phone. But it interrupts my conversation with my daughter.

When I walk to the station I practise Japanese with Flashspeak. I just talk, the AI assesses my fluency, fetches the next card and explains tricky grammar. Hands-free, eyes-free, no screen staring. But no tutor.

In each case the underlying technology is ordinary: a database, a flashcard app. AI doesn’t replace any of it. Our legacy systems — the mobile apps, the databases, the web pages built for specific purposes — aren’t going away. We’re building on top of them, so that AI can stand in front and translate.

The tedium shifts though. Instead of wrestling with dropdowns, you wrestle with the AI — rephrasing, correcting, arguing about what you actually meant. The better it gets, the easier it is to just let it choose. Maybe that’s trust. Or maybe that’s agency, quietly leaving the room.

Which leaves a harder question: maybe it’s fine to replace the transaction — the form, the dropdown, the waiter at the counter. But are we replacing the person too? How do we keep labouring to build beautiful things for each other — and not spin out into isolation, each of us in a private loop, consuming content made for an audience of one?