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 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 evolved over decades could be shared in minutes.
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.
0 CE – 1750 CEThe 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.
1750 – 1850The Steam Revolution
Everything changed however 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:
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 your town*.
But with railroads that meant mobility. And mobility demanded precision. You couldn't run a train schedule when every station just decided on the time wily 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 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.
1950 – 2000The Internet Revolution
If the telegraph made communication instant and room-sized computers made calculation lightning-fast, the next leap was making the whole system distributed enough that no single point of failure could take it down.
The story starts in 1958, when the Soviets launched Sputnik and panicked American policymakers into funding decades of research, including a strange little Pentagon agency called ARPA. Eleven years later, on October 29, 1969, a UCLA grad student named Charley Kline tried to send the word "LOGIN" to a computer at Stanford over a four-node experimental network called ARPANET. The system crashed after the first two letters. So, technically, the first message ever sent over what would become the internet was "LO." (As in, "Lo and behold, this thing barely works." A fitting start, honestly.)
It took until 1974 for two researchers, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, to design TCP/IP — the protocol that let separate, incompatible networks actually talk to each other. That's the part nobody puts in the highlight reel, but it's the part that mattered: not one network, but a network of networks, agreeing on a shared language.
Email, somewhat hilariously, beat almost everything else to the punch. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email and picked the @ symbol — mostly because it was just sitting there, unused, on his keyboard — to separate the user from the machine. He couldn't tell you what that first message said. He didn't think to save it.
By the late 1970s and into the 80s, personal computers — the Altair, the Apple II, the IBM PC — pulled computing out of climate-controlled rooms and onto actual desks. And then, in 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, had what might be the most consequential idea of the century: a "web" of documents that could link to any other document, anywhere, instantly. He built the first browser and the first web server on the same NeXT computer, and in 1991 he put the whole thing on the open internet for anyone to use — free, no royalties, ever. (Imagine being the one person who could have charged tolls on the entire internet, forever, and just … didn't.)
What followed was less an invention than an avalanche: the Mosaic browser in 1993, Netscape going public in 1994 and turning the web into an overnight gold rush, the screech of a dial-up modem becoming the single most recognizable sound of a decade, "You've Got Mail" as both a movie title and a literal, daily event in millions of households. By 1998, two Stanford PhD students had built a search engine in a garage that could sort the entire web in under a second.
Each of these, on its own, looks like a story about connection. Stacked together, they're a story about latency — about an entire civilization quietly agreeing to shrink the distance between a question and an answer down to almost nothing.
2010sThe Cloud Changes Everything
Then came the device that put all of it in your pocket. I still remember holding the first iPhone in 2007 — so sleek, so impossibly futuristic, it felt like a religious experience. Steve Jobs didn't just release a phone; he collapsed the entire internet down to whatever was in your hand. The gap between having a question and getting an answer shrank to however long it took to reach into your pocket.
By the 2010s, high-frequency traders were measuring communication delays in microseconds, and everyday smartphone users could stream live video to someone on the opposite side of Earth with barely a blink of lag. The 2010s took that momentum and aimed it somewhere bigger: not just at how fast information moved, but at how fast ideas could become products.
The decade was defined by what happened when Amazon, Google, and Microsoft figured out how to make computing power instant and 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, the rise of 4G networks meant your phone became 10 times faster than 3G, "increasing download speeds from 1.5 Mbit/s to 15 Mbit/s." An 8-minute song that once took over 5 minutes to download now took 30 seconds. But more importantly, this speed enabled entirely new behaviors: streaming video, video calls, real-time gaming — activities that transformed from impossible to mundane in just a few years.
Every one of those gains, though, was still bound by something physical — server racks, fiber lines, spectrum auctions. The next compression wasn't going to come from faster pipes. It was going to come from something that could think.
Present DayThe Caveman With Fire
But here's what's truly remarkable: nothing in human history has compressed time the way AI is right now. Not steam. Not the telegraph. Not even fire.
Wait — are you saying AI compares to the invention of fire? Are you crazy?
Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.
Software companies are shipping in days what used to take quarters. But drug discovery is where this stops being a vibe and starts being a paper trail.
Traditional drug discovery takes 4 to 5 years just to land on a viable preclinical candidate. UK-based Exscientia compressed that lead-discovery timeline down to roughly 12–15 months. Their first AI-designed molecule, a treatment for OCD, went from initial idea to clinical-trial candidate in 12 months flat — the first AI-designed drug ever to reach human trials. Hong Kong's Insilico Medicine took an idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drug from target hypothesis to preclinical validation in 18 months, for $1.8 million — a rounding error against what that process normally costs.
Then there's Shift Bioscience, a UK startup running cellular reprogramming experiments through AI-driven virtual cells. They claim campaigns "that would have taken centuries in the real world can be performed in less than a year," and they've already identified multiple genetic interventions that rejuvenate aging cells — work that used to be measured in lifetimes, now measured in months.
These aren't vibes dressed up as data. They're specific companies, specific molecules, specific timelines, and they all point the same direction: the people and businesses figuring out how to wield these tools are compressing time at a rate we genuinely have not seen before.
Here's the uncomfortable framing I keep landing on: you are, right now, a caveman who's just been handed fire. The people who pick it up will cook, stay warm, see in the dark. The people who don't will keep rubbing sticks together in a cave lit by everyone else's flame. The question was never whether to use these tools. It's how fast you can learn to hold them without burning your hand off.
Here's the thing about impatience, though — the thing the mindfulness people are still right about, even as I make my case for it. Compression has a cost. Every leap I've just walked you through also broke something: the plow broke the bands of foragers who couldn't compete with farms, the factory clock broke the rhythm of a body that doesn't run on shifts, the smartphone broke our ability to be bored, which turns out to have been doing more work than we gave it credit for. Speed has never been free. We've just always decided it was worth the price.
So no, I don't think our impatience is a flaw to medicate away. I think it's the oldest trait we've got — older than language, older than fire — the simple, stubborn refusal to let the world move slower than we want it to. Every tool in this essay, from a sharpened rock to a model that can design a molecule, is just that refusal wearing a different costume.
What changes with AI isn't the instinct. It's the leash. For 400,000 years, our impatience ran into a wall — muscle, weather, the speed of a horse, the speed of light through copper wire. Most of those walls are gone now. The only real constraint left is how fast we can figure out what's actually worth wanting.
That's not a reason to slow down. It never has been. It's a reason to be honest, faster than ever, about what we're racing toward — because the gap between desire and fulfillment is about to keep shrinking whether we've thought it through or not.
So here's where this lands: we are not a species that waits well, and we never were. We just got a lot better at not having to. And if that makes us impatient, restless, perpetually unsatisfied — good. That's not the bug. That's the engine. It's been running this whole time.