I have a theory about what makes us human. It's not our opposable thumbs or our big brains or our ability to cooperate in large groups (though all of those matter).
It's... wait for it... (I said wait for it. Are you waiting for it?)... our impatience.
We live in a world where desire and fulfillment have collapsed into the same moment. You think of a friend across the country. You hear their voice seconds later. You wonder about something. You get an answer before the question fully forms in your mind. You crave Thai food at 9 PM and with a couple taps of your screen, silky noodles glossed with sweet soy sauce arrive steaming at your door.
Mindfulness experts will tell us this has led to a society plagued by anxiety, shortened attention spans, and an inability to find satisfaction in the present moment. They'll tell us to learn to sit with discomfort, enjoy the process instead of rushing toward the outcome. And I agree.
But I also think this impatience isn't a modern affliction. It's the most human thing about us. I'd even go so far as to say it's the secret engine of human progress.
Just look at the entire sweep of our species. Every major breakthrough — from stone tools to artificial intelligence — has been fundamentally about the same thing: compressing time. Making the gap between intention and outcome smaller.
If you think about it, the real measure of human progress isn't how smart we've gotten. It's how fast we've gotten at turning our ideas into reality.
So, dear reader, in this piece I want to take you on a journey through time — one that will show you how every leap forward in human history has been about one thing: speed. We're going to travel from prehistoric tool-making all the way to today's technological revolution. I promise this has everything to do with AI, but first we need to understand the pattern that got us here.
So buckle up, because we're about to compress 400,000 years of human history into a few thousand words.
400,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE
When Sharp Meant Fast
Our ancestors figured out the speed game early. The first human to knap a sharp edge onto a piece of flint wasn't just making a better tool — they were making a faster tool. What once took hours of gnawing meat off bones could now be done in minutes with a blade.
Fire was even more profound. It didn't just provide warmth — it hacked our very biology. A raw tuber that took hours to chew and days to digest became a tender meal the body could process efficiently.
But the real breakthrough was temporal: fire extended the productive day. For the first time in Earth's history, a species had figured out how to steal time from darkness.
Then came language, our first communication protocol. The moment humans could transmit complex ideas through speech, we compressed the transfer of knowledge from generations to conversations. A hunting strategy that evolved over decades could be shared in minutes.
10,000 BCE – 0 CE
Farming as Time Control
If stone tools were about stealing minutes, agriculture was about controlling months.
Domesticating plants and animals collapsed the wild unpredictability of food supply into something resembling a production schedule. Instead of wandering for days to find sparse berries, farming peoples could plan for abundance. Early farmers learned to save seeds from the most fruitful crops and irrigation canals guaranteed water for fields on human timetables, not nature's whims.
And then around 4,000 BCE, some brilliant Sumerian figured out how to hook a bent wooden blade to an ox. Suddenly, one farmer could prepare fields that would have taken a team of people with hand tools weeks to complete.
The plow made farming easier and exponentially faster: More food, less time. More surplus, more specialists. More specialists, more innovation. The flywheel of civilization had begun.
0 CE – 1750 CE
The Long Pause
But for the next 1,700 years, something interesting happened. With all the innovation we had in the agricultural era, nothing fundamentally changed about the speed of human activity.
A Chinese blacksmith in 200 AD, if teleported to 1620s Paris, wouldn't find much of the world different in terms of velocity. Sure, he'd be confused by the foreign faces and strange customs (and probably very curious about whatever teleportation device brought him there) but the fundamental rhythms of life would be familiar. The fastest way to send a message across an empire was still a guy on a horse.
This wasn't stagnation — there were plenty of innovations during this period. But they were mostly about doing things better, not faster. The fundamental constraints of muscle, wind, and water remained unbroken.
Until one Sunday afternoon in Glasgow changed everything.
1750 – 1850
The Steam Revolution
Everything changed when James Watt, walking on Glasgow Green in 1765, had a flash of insight: could we keep steam hot in one chamber while condensing it in another? It was a simple idea that made steam engines five times more efficient. And it changed the entire course of human innovation.
It's hard to explain just how many possibilities the Industrial Revolution unlocked: fresh food could suddenly travel hundreds of miles before spoiling; clothes became more readily available and cheaper; people could visit family across the country; workers could live in one city and commute to jobs in another; tourism became possible.
What's especially remarkable is that steam didn't just make individual tasks faster — it synchronized human civilization. Literally.
Before the Industrial Revolution, each town often kept their own local time. That meant a neighboring town, say a measly 50 miles away, might be on a completely different clock than yours.* But with railroads came mobility. And mobility demanded precision. You couldn't run a train schedule when every station just decided on the time willy nilly.
The Industrial Revolution didn't just compress time — it standardized it, creating the first truly synchronized society in human history.
1850 – 1950
The Telegraph Era
Even as steam powered the legs of progress, a quieter revolution was unfolding in how fast ideas could travel.
In 1844, Samuel Morse's telegraph proved that a message could flash across hundreds of miles instantaneously, obliterating a barrier that had constrained humans for millennia. A Baltimore newspaper marveled that "Time and space had been completely annihilated" by these electrified wires.
The effect was civilizational whiplash. News that once trudged at the speed of a horse now danced along copper lines at near light-speed. A cotton farmer in Mississippi could get Liverpool prices today, not next season. A general could coordinate far-flung troops in minutes rather than waiting days for couriers.
When the telephone came along a short time later, it added even more immediacy. People could convey tone and complex instructions in real time across continents. By the mid-20th century, room-sized computers were compressing calculations from hours to milliseconds.
Each innovation slashed the latency of human affairs — and set the stage for something even more audacious.
1950 – 2000
The Internet Revolution
The story of the internet starts, believe it or not, with a Russian beach ball.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik — a 184-pound metal sphere that beeped its way around Earth every 96 minutes. Americans could track it with backyard radios. The sound was benign. The implication was not: if the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they could put a nuclear warhead in one too. Washington panicked in the productive way. Within months, DARPA was created, and its engineers started asking a dangerous question: what if a communication network could survive a nuclear strike?
Centralized systems could be taken out with a single hit. You needed something distributed — something that could route around damage and keep talking no matter what. That thinking became ARPANET. And on October 29, 1969, a student programmer named Charley Kline at UCLA typed "L-O" into a terminal, trying to log into a computer at Stanford Research Institute 350 miles away — and the system crashed. The first message ever sent across a computer network was "LO." Accidentally poetic.
But they got it working. And then Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn — working out of Stanford and DARPA in the early 1970s — figured out the plumbing that would let radically different computer systems talk to each other. Their TCP/IP protocol, adopted as the universal standard on January 1, 1983 (a day engineers still call "Flag Day"), is still the backbone of the internet today. Every email, every streaming video, every encrypted bank transaction runs on rules those two figured out fifty years ago.
Then, in 1989, a quietly brilliant British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he submitted a proposal his boss famously annotated "vague but exciting." His idea was the World Wide Web: a system where documents on different computers could link to each other through a shared language (HTML) and a universal address system (URLs). It sounds obvious now. It was not obvious then.
By 1993, a 22-year-old named Marc Andreessen had built Mosaic at the University of Illinois — the first browser that let ordinary people point and click their way around the Web. Netscape followed in 1994. Amazon launched in 1995. Google in 1998. In roughly five years, a decades-long defense research project went from government labs to your parents arguing about AOL dial-up.
By the late 1990s, high-frequency traders were measuring communication delays in microseconds. Knowledge itself had begun to travel at the speed of light.
2000s – 2010s
The Cloud Changes Everything
The 2000s added another compression: mobility. In 2007, Steve Jobs walked onstage and described a product as "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" — then revealed they were all the same thing. The iPhone didn't just make a better phone; it made the entire internet fit in your pocket. The time between having a question and getting an answer collapsed to however long it took to pull your device out and tap.
The 2010s were then defined by what happened when Amazon, Google, and Microsoft figured out how to make computing power instant and essentially infinite. Cloud computing didn't just change how we store files — it compressed the time between having an idea and building something real.
Before the cloud, if you wanted to start a tech company, you needed months and thousands of dollars just to buy servers and set up infrastructure. By 2015, you could spin up a startup with global reach in an afternoon for the cost of a coffee. Uber, Airbnb, Instagram — none of these would have been possible without cloud computing making scale instant and accessible.
Meanwhile, 4G networks made your phone ten times faster than 3G. An 8-minute song that once took five minutes to download now took thirty seconds. But more importantly, this speed enabled entirely new behaviors: streaming video, video calls, real-time gaming — activities that transformed from technically impossible to completely mundane in just a few years.
Each decade, the same pattern: a new compression. A new floor established. And always, the next generation looks at the previous baseline and wonders how anyone survived it.
Which brings us to right now. And this one is different.
Present Day
AI and the Fire Analogy I Keep Returning To
I'll tell you what tipped me off that something genuinely different was happening. I was using an AI coding assistant to build a feature that would have taken me two full days of frustrated Stack Overflow spelunking. I built it in ninety minutes. And I remember sitting back and thinking: wait, I just stole a day and a half from thin air.
Where did that time go? It didn't go anywhere, exactly. Time doesn't compress. But our ability to execute has gotten dramatically more efficient — and it turns out that's functionally the same thing.
But here's what's truly remarkable: nowhere in human history have we been able to compress time like this. Not even with fire.
Wait, are you saying AI compares to the invention of fire? Are you crazy?
Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Hear me out.
The drug discovery numbers are the most legible proof. Traditional drug development takes 4–5 years just to identify a viable preclinical candidate. UK company Exscientia compressed that to 12–15 months for their first AI-designed drug — targeting OCD — which became the first AI-designed molecule ever to reach human clinical trials. Hong Kong's Insilico Medicine moved from a target hypothesis to preclinical validation on an idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drug in 18 months, for $1.8 million — a fraction of the time and a rounding error of the usual cost. And UK startup Shift Bioscience says experimental campaigns "that would have taken centuries in the real world can be performed in less than a year" via AI-simulated biology. Centuries. In a year.
Software companies are shipping faster than they ever have. Content is being created at volumes that were previously impossible. The businesses and individuals that learn to use these tools effectively are manipulating time in ways we've never seen before.
But here's the fire parallel I keep returning to. The most important thing about fire wasn't that it cooked food faster. It was that it unlocked possibilities that hadn't existed before. Cooked food meant more calories from the same input. More calories meant bigger brains. Bigger brains meant everything else that followed. Fire didn't just speed up the work of being human. It changed what human beings were capable of becoming.
AI isn't just compressing the tasks we were already doing. It's beginning to unlock categories of work that were previously impossible for anyone short of a well-funded research institution. That's the fire parallel. That's why I can't let go of it.
You are living through a moment where you're essentially a caveman who's been handed fire. Those not using AI? They're still living in darkness, rubbing sticks together while you can cook, stay warm, and see in the night. The question isn't whether you should use these tools — it's how quickly you can learn to wield them.
Conclusion
The Plane Has Landed
So here's where we've arrived, after 400,000 years of human impatience: from flint to fire to farming to steam to telegraph to internet to cloud to AI — the pattern is always the same. Smaller gap. Faster execution. More possible. And then the next generation forgets that anything was ever slower, and calls that baseline "normal."
The thing that's different now is the speed of the speedup itself. Agriculture took millennia to spread across continents. Steam took a century to fully transform industry. The internet went from ARPANET to something your grandma argues about at Thanksgiving in a little over thirty years. AI is being adopted faster than any technology in recorded history, and we are still in the early chapters.
Which puts all of us in a genuinely strange position. We are living through the compressed version of a civilizational shift — watching it happen in real time, while we're still inside it. That's disorienting. It's supposed to be. Every generation that lived through a real discontinuity — the printing press, the railroad, electrification — felt the same vertigo. The ones who thrived were the ones who leaned into the change rather than waiting for it to stabilize.
But if the arc of the last 400,000 years tells us anything, it's this: human beings have never been good at accepting that something just takes as long as it takes. We are constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone. We will always find a way to go faster. And somehow, improbably, this has turned out to be a pretty good survival strategy.
I started this essay with a theory: that our impatience is the most human thing about us. I still believe that. But I've come to think the deeper truth is that impatience isn't a character flaw we've learned to channel productively. It's the engine. It's always been the engine. Every tool, every network, every revolution in the history of our species has been a formalized version of the same primal refusal: this takes too long, and I'm going to do something about it.
The race against time continues. We're just running faster than ever — and for the first time, we've built something that runs alongside us.