For a long time, computers have been "bicycles for the mind"—Steve Jobs’ famous idea that technology is just a way to make our own pedaling more efficient. It was a great image for the era of word processors and spreadsheets. But with a bicycle if you stop pedaling, you stop moving. Humans are still the source of power.
If the personal computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is a motorcycle: we steer, but now there is no need to pedal.
We’ve moved past the bicycle and into the era of power tools for the mind. AI has motorized the word processor and spreadsheets.
The first thing this added power does is remove what we usually call grunt work. In any project, there is the drudgery gap between the vision and seeing it through to shipping. Think about refinishing a hardwood floor: there are hours of grueling, soul-crushing sanding and scraping, even with power tools, before you ever get to the consequential choice of stain and seeing the grain pop. With AI, you can offload the sweat equity of that type of prep work. If you’re trying to understand fifty different research papers or drafting a persuasive essay from scratch, you aren't grinding on the drudgery. You're jumping straight across the gap to the work of making meaningful decisions.
But a power tool isn’t just about raw force; it changes the way you can iterate. In a woodshop, a tool like a power sander allows you to shape or smooth out a curve in seconds rather than hours. AI does the same for your ideas. It can be a sounding board that lets you shape an idea, see if it breaks, and refine it in real-time. By cycling through different versions of a concept, you can sharpen the logic through constant feedback. The tool handles the rapid-fire generation; you provide the direction.
The Sovereignty of Taste.Saying "it’s easy to be a critic," is usually a way to dismiss people who don't want to, or likely, can’t do the 'hard work' themselves. But in a world where the power tools handle the drudgery, being a critic is actually the valuable work you can do. We’ve moved from being the grunt to being the Foreman.
In manual work, you can’t afford to be too critical because rejecting a version could mean hours of rework. You settle for done because the cost of perfect is too high. But when an AI can iterate through different designs or complex drafts quickly, value lies entirely in discernment. Your expertise and your subjective taste are the gears that engage the motor. You are finally free to reject ninety-nine bad cuts until the tool produces the one that meets your standard.
At the end of the day, this is the industrialization of thought. By offloading the sweat of cognitive execution to motorized inference, we aren't just working faster—we’re becoming more scalable. We are no longer limited by how many mental cycles we can manually expend in a day. We get to act as foreman, using raw computational force to build ideas that were previously just too heavy or too much work.
In this era of motorcycles for the mind, the most valuable skill isn't the ability to labor. It’s generating creative useful ideas, mastering the throttle and the ability to recognize what is good.