I found this line in The Wave Is the Sea, by Willigis Jäger, a German monk who also became a Zen teacher. I wasn't reading it looking for anything to do with AI. It found me anyway:
We find ourselves in a situation of tremendous change. I sense that we are at the beginning of an accelerated evolution of the human species, without knowing where it will lead us. (…) If new technologies are going to flood the Earth (…) it is not logical to assume that our current mental capacities are sufficient to meet these challenges. All that remains to us is the hope of an evolutionary progress of human consciousness: that the human race develops the capacity to release new mental potentials, and, moreover, that there is enough time left to achieve it. Only then will our consciousness have developed.
Jäger wasn't writing about artificial intelligence. He died before most of what we now call AI existed. But the shape of what he's describing, technology outrunning the capacity needed to meet it, is exactly something I'm reflecting on lately.
He's specific about what has to evolve. Not only cognitive keeping up with new tools. Consciousness: moving away from ego and toward something he calls transpersonal: not one perspective deciding alone, but something held collectively. I don't know if humanity gets there in time, at the scale he's writing about. I clearly don't have the answer.
There's a narrower version of the same problem I can actually watch happen, day to day. AI is very good at making us do. Generate, ship, iterate, again. The pace of doing keeps accelerating, and somewhere inside that acceleration, the personal and the transpersonal, what actually matters to me and what matters beyond me, get quietly crowded out. Nobody decides this on purpose. It's just easy, almost frictionless, to lose track of your own priorities when the tool in front of you is built to keep you doing.
There's a specific way of seeing the world underneath that doing. Used this way, technology configures a gaze: a world made of things to use, to optimize, to control. Useful, most days. But if a society becomes hyper-technified enough, I keep asking myself where everything that isn't that gaze actually goes.
I feel a version of this question in my own design craft. As product designers our real contribution was never the fastest output. It's the part that isn't generated: judgment, taste, the specific thing one person or one team notices that nobody asked a model to notice. Data helps here, but only partway. Quantitative data tells you what happened. It rarely tells you why, and why is the part design actually lives in. What can't be counted easily is exactly what's at risk of quietly sliding to second place, and I don't think that's new because of AI. We already had those problems in a good number of tech companies. AI just makes it easier to keep doing that at a much larger scale.
This is not me arguing against AI. I use it. I'm excited about its capabilities, and I also have the FOMO you all have. It's a question about what else has to stay in the room while we build with it: what we're evolving toward, and what future we actually want, not just the one that's fastest to ship.
That's why when I created my agentic team, the first thing I did was explicitly tell it its job is not to agree with me. I don't want to optimise it for a faster yes (when we are talking about judgment). I wanted the opposite: something structurally incapable of just telling me what I want to hear. The design system I lead runs on the same question, quieter. What it gives me back is real: less manual checking, more consistency at a scale no team of mine could hold by hand. What I keep trying to point it at isn't speed. It's what I can give back through it, aimed at something bigger than my own output. But when we talk about an agentic design system, there is still some sci-fi there since the craft, the intent, the experience,... still is on us (at least today, while I'm writing this on August 2026).
At a larger scale, the same question shows up less comfortably. I lead a distributed design team, and I keep watching the same thing happen with more junior roles. They ask a model to make something "professional," then they're stuck, because "professional" isn't a design decision. It's the absence of one. When I push them to say what they actually mean, what they want a user to feel, what visual reference they have in mind, what they like about a competitor's pattern, most of them struggle to answer. Not because they lack taste. Because nobody asked them to put their own judgment into words before the model could generate an answer for them instead. That's a big thing, we need to put into words things that we don't know how to explain.
The philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh asks whether we're authors of our technology, users of it, or its creatures. I think about that question every time this happens on my team. A designer who can direct an AI toward something specific is authoring. One who can only accept whatever the model defaults to isn't using the tool. The tool is using them, quietly, one "professional" at a time.
This isn't happening because AI is bad or because junior designers are careless. It's happening because almost nobody is building in the time it takes to develop that judgment in the first place. Judy Wajcman argues that the time pressure we feel from technology is mostly self-imposed, a choice about what we value, not something technology does to us against our will. I think she's right, and it's an uncomfortable thing to be right about, because it means the industry could choose differently and mostly doesn't. We reward the release, not the reflection before it. A model trained on everything already made can convincingly remix that abundance. It cannot actually innovate. Only we can decide a user should feel something specific, and only if we make the time to ask.
Jäger ends his line on hope, that human consciousness will develop in time, if there's enough time left. I have less hope than he did. Not because of the technology itself, but because of who's currently deciding how fast it moves. It isn't an abstract, inevitable force. It's specific companies and specific people, and what that speed is optimised for is attention, ego, being first, not the kind of collective reflection he's describing. Tristan Harris keeps putting the same question to the industry, in different words each time: are we upgrading humanity, or downgrading it?
Technology isn't separate from us anymore, if it ever was. It's coupled to how we think, decide, and pay attention, and that coupling isn't going to undo itself. The actual choice in front of us is what we couple it with: an individual ego, a company's growth targets, or something transpersonal, oriented toward where we go together rather than where any one of us gets there first. That's not a technology question. It's the same question Jäger was asking about consciousness, just asked at the scale of a product roadmap instead of a species.
But I still believe the answer, if there is one, isn't a faster model. It's the smaller, slower thing Jäger was actually pointing at: ego giving way to something held together, not alone. I don't get to prove that at the scale he was writing about. I don't know if we'll get there in time. I know the ego won't get us there faster.
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