An Essay

The Speed of Being Human

On impatience, and the four hundred millennia we spent indulging it

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, to 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 BCEWhen 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 took decades to evolve could now be shared in minutes. And once an idea could outrun the lifespan of the person who had it, there was no putting the species back in its cave.

10,000 BCE – 0 CEFarming 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 to turn. And then, strangely, it almost stopped.

0 CE – 1750 CEThe Long Pause

For the next 1,700 years, something interesting happened. With all the innovation we'd built up 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. They would stay that way until a Scotsman, of all people, lost his patience with a kettle.

1750 – 1850The Steam Revolution

Everything changed when James Watt, walking on Glasgow Green one Sunday 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:

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 its own local time. That meant a neighboring town, say a measly 50 miles away, might be on a completely different clock than yours.* But railroads meant 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.

Author's note: Can you believe that? It was only a couple hundred years ago that time itself was completely arbitrary! ↩

1850 – 1950The 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 telegraph wires.

The effect was civilizational whiplash. News that once trudged at the speed of a horse now danced along electrified lines at 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. Each innovation slashed the latency of human affairs — and by the mid-20th century, digital computers the size of a school bus were compressing calculations from hours to milliseconds. The next step was almost inevitable: what if all of those machines could talk to each other?

1950 – 2000The Internet Revolution

If the telegraph made communication instant and room-sized computers made calculation lightning-fast, the obvious next move was to wire the two together. And for once, the breakthrough didn't come from a lone genius on a Sunday walk. It came from a Cold War committee worried about its phone lines.

In 1969, a project funded by the Pentagon's ARPA stitched together four university computers — UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and Utah — into something called the ARPANET. On October 29, a UCLA student named Charley Kline tried to log in to the machine at Stanford by typing "LOGIN." The system crashed after two letters. So the first thing ever sent across the ancestor of the internet was, gloriously, "LO" — as in lo and behold. You could not script it better.

Then came the plumbing. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email and, needing a way to separate a person from their machine, reached for a symbol nobody else was using: the @. (Every email address you've ever typed is a tiny monument to a guy grabbing the least-busy key on his keyboard.) A few years later, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn designed TCP/IP, the common tongue that would let any network talk to any other network. On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET switched over to it in a single coordinated day the engineers cheerfully called "flag day."

But all of this was still a clubhouse for professors and the Pentagon. What made the internet ours was Tim Berners-Lee. In 1989, a British computer scientist working at CERN wrote a modest proposal — his boss famously scrawled "vague but exciting" across the top — for a "web" of information where any document could link to any other document, anywhere in the world. By 1991 the first website was live. Then in 1993 a 21-year-old named Marc Andreessen and his team released Mosaic, the first browser that put pictures and words on the same page, and the whole thing finally clicked for ordinary humans. Netscape followed in 1994, and the gold rush was on.

The numbers tell the story better than I can. In 1993 there were perhaps 130 websites on the entire planet; by 2000 there were millions. An entire generation learned the sound of a modem handshake — that unholy screech of static and beeps — as the sound of the world cracking open. The telegraph had annihilated time and space for a single sentence. The internet did it for the whole library at once.

And then we put the whole library in our pockets. I still remember holding the first iPhone in 2007 — so sleek, so impossibly futuristic that it genuinely felt like a religious experience. Steve Jobs didn't just build a phone; he handed every one of us the entire internet, and the gap between having a question and getting an answer collapsed to however long it took to dig the thing out of your jeans. Which, it turned out, was only the warm-up act.

2010sThe Cloud Changes Everything

The 2010s were defined by what happened when Amazon, Google, and Microsoft figured out how to make computing power instant and effectively 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 stand 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 them would have been possible without the cloud making scale instant and accessible.

Meanwhile, the rise of 4G meant your phone became roughly ten times faster than it had been on 3G, jumping download speeds from around 1.5 Mbit/s to 15 Mbit/s. An 8-minute song that once took over five minutes to download now took thirty seconds. But the speed mattered less than what it unlocked: streaming video, video calls, real-time gaming — activities that went from impossible to mundane in the space of a few years.

By the end of the decade, high-frequency traders were measuring their advantage in microseconds — millionths of a second — while the rest of us streamed live video to the far side of the Earth without a second thought. And yet, for all of it, the 2010s were still mostly about moving things faster: files, videos, money, ourselves. The next leap wouldn't just move our ideas around the planet. It would start having them alongside us.

Present DayCaveman, Meet Fire

Here's what's truly remarkable: nowhere in human history have we compressed time the way we're doing it right now with AI. Not with the steam engine. Not with the telegraph. Not — and I mean this — 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.

I've watched it happen in my own work. Software teams are shipping in days what used to take quarters. One person can now write, design, and publish what used to require a whole department. And the curve isn't flattening — every year, the distance between "I have an idea" and "the idea exists" gets shorter.

Take drug discovery, where the old numbers felt like a law of nature: four to five years just to find a single viable preclinical candidate. Then the AI-native labs showed up. The UK's Exscientia squeezed that 4.5-year hunt down to roughly twelve to fifteen months — and pushed the first AI-designed molecule, a treatment for OCD, from idea to human trials in a single year, the first AI-designed drug ever to reach a clinical trial. Hong Kong's Insilico Medicine took a candidate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis from target hypothesis to preclinical validation in eighteen months for $1.8 million — a rounding error against the usual bill.

And then there's the example that genuinely keeps me up at night. Shift Bioscience, working on cellular reprogramming, says experiments "that would have taken centuries in the real world can be performed in less than a year" inside their AI-driven virtual cells — collapsing the search for ways to rejuvenate a living cell from lifetimes into months.

Read that again. Centuries, into a year.

The people and companies learning to wield these tools aren't just working faster. They're bending time in a way no generation before them could. You are, right now, a caveman who has just been handed fire. The people refusing to pick it up are still in the dark, rubbing two sticks together and insisting the spark is a fad — while you can already cook, stay warm, and see in the night. The question was never whether to use these tools. It's how fast you can learn to hold the flame.

In ClosingLanding the Plane

So here we are, four hundred thousand years from that first sharpened flint, and the pattern has never once broken. Stone, fire, language, the plow, steam, the telegraph, the web, the cloud, and now this — every single leap was the same leap wearing different clothes. Each one shaved time off the distance between wanting and having.

That's the through-line. We are the species that refuses to accept "that's just how long it takes." We are impatient in the best possible way — and that impatience, the very thing the mindfulness apps are trying so hard to cure us of, is the engine that dragged us out of the cave in the first place.

Is AI really a bigger deal than fire? I honestly don't know — ask me in fifty years. But I'll say this much. Fire let us cook what we caught. AI is starting to turn a sentence into a molecule and a prompt into a working thing. For the first time, the tool isn't just compressing the gap between our hands and the world. It's compressing the gap between our minds and the world.

Our ancestors stole minutes from the dark. We're now stealing centuries from the lab.

So no, I'm not going to tell you to slow down and savor the present moment — though you probably should, and so should I. I'm going to tell you the thing this whole journey has been quietly circling: in the human story, faster has always meant further. The race against time was never a sickness to be cured. It's the most human thing we do.

And we are only just getting started.

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