If This Is the Beginning

An invitation to explore how AI is quietly rewiring human experience

The orchestration era has arrived.

By the end of today, an estimated 180 million people will have used ChatGPT at least once, exchanging over 500 million messages. That's more daily users than Instagram had in its first four years, or roughly the number of people who speak Spanish as a first language.

And yet, this is still just the dawn of AI's integration into everyday life.

We are not witnessing disruption in the traditional sense. We're watching absorption: a quiet rewiring of human experience that's happening at unprecedented scale and speed. While we debate AGI timelines and job displacement, something more fundamental is already underway. The systematic restructuring of how humans think, relate, and exist.

I write this from an unusual vantage point: I'm building AI orchestration systems at Larridin, where we help Fortune 500 teams use AI more safely and effectively. But I'm also deep in the code myself, working with my HKMC.us partners and collaborators Hanz Kurdi and Eoin Bailey on Pegasus, a tool that helps the world's most sophisticated private capital fund managers use machine intelligence for diligence and portfolio management. This dual perspective as architect of enterprise systems while rediscovering my own fidelity as a programmer in the age of AI gives me a unique view of what's happening. What I'm seeing doesn't match our narratives of disruption.

It looks more like digestion. And we are all being metabolized.

The Slow Rewrite of the Human Operating System

When calculators arrived, we lost our arithmetic muscles. That was a crack in the cognitive foundation. Small, manageable, even beneficial. What's happening now is not a crack. It's a reconstruction.

Consider what's already shifting: A Stanford study found that students using AI assistants for problem-solving showed decreased ability to work through similar problems independently after just two weeks. Microsoft researchers discovered that developers using Copilot wrote 40% more code but spent 23% less time understanding what that code actually did. These aren't bugs in the system. They're features of a new cognitive architecture.

I feel this in my own work. Five years ago, writing a strategy document meant staring at blank pages, struggling through bad drafts, finding clarity somewhere around version three. Now? A conversation with Claude, some refinement, and something workable emerges in twenty minutes.

The efficiency is intoxicating. But here's what I'm tracking in myself and others:

• Tolerance for cognitive friction has plummeted

• Expectation for immediate coherence has skyrocketed

• Relationship to uncertainty feels increasingly fragile

And I build these systems. I understand their limitations, their biases, their fundamental alienness. Yet still, the rewiring happens. Not through force, but through convenience.

This isn't a moral panic. It's an acknowledgment. When we outsource pattern recognition, synthesis, and even ideation, we don't just gain efficiency. We lose cognitive calluses we didn't know we needed.

The End of Productive Friction

There's a term in psychology called "desirable difficulty": the idea that certain struggles are features, not bugs, in human development. Wrestling with words until you find the right one. Fumbling through an awkward conversation until you reach understanding. Sitting with uncertainty until insight emerges.

AI eliminates friction. That's its superpower. But friction is where growth lives.

The evidence is mounting: A Harvard Business School study found that consultants using AI for creative tasks showed less innovative thinking in subsequent non-AI tasks. Therapists report clients arriving with AI-scripted insights that feel profound but lack the transformative power of hard-won personal revelation. Teachers describe students who can produce perfect essays but struggle to defend their ideas in conversation.

Consider what's already changing:

• Why struggle with an apology when AI can craft the perfect one?

• Why navigate difficult feedback when you can workshop it with your AI coach first?

• Why endure the discomfort of not knowing when answers are a prompt away?

The risk isn't that we'll become lazy. It's that we'll become smooth, losing the rough edges where resilience forms, where empathy develops, where real human connection happens.

We're building tools to eliminate friction. We need to be equally intentional about preserving the friction that makes us grow.

The Strange New Economics of Expertise

Here's a pattern that's reshaping every industry: In an AI-saturated world, being great at explaining often matters more than being great at doing.

I'm watching this play out across Silicon Valley. Developers who can't code as elegantly as GPT-4 but who can articulate programming logic with exceptional clarity are outperforming traditional experts. Designers who aren't pixel-perfect themselves but who can describe design principles precisely are creating stunning work through AI collaboration. Sales teams that can codify their processes are scaling faster than those with superior individual performers.

The old saying "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" is being inverted. In the orchestration age, those who can teach, especially those who can teach machines, wield unexpected power.

This isn't just about prompt engineering. It's about a fundamental shift in how value is created and captured. The most important skill is becoming the ability to decompose expertise into transmittable components.

We Are All Conductors Now

If there's one shift I'd name above all others, it's this: Humans are transitioning from being the workers to being the orchestrators of work.

In the industrial era, we scaled through physical labor. In the knowledge era, we scaled through decision-making. In what's emerging, call it the orchestration era, we scale through designing how intelligence flows.

This isn't metaphorical. Look at any modern workflow: Every prompt is a routing decision. Every AI interaction is a design choice about how intent becomes output. We're not just using tools; we're conducting symphonies of human and machine cognition.

The most successful people and organizations I observe aren't trying to compete with AI or hide from it. They're learning to be excellent conductors, routing tasks, context, and creativity between human and artificial nodes in a larger intelligence network.

Your value used to come from what you could do. Increasingly, it comes from how well you can orchestrate what gets done.

And if humans are becoming conductors, not just users, then we need more than tools. We need meaning-making structures to help us navigate this shift.

Building the Whole Earth Catalog for the AI Age

In 1968, Stewart Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, not just a product guide but a framework for understanding tools in the context of human flourishing. Its subtitle was "Access to Tools," but its real gift was access to ways of thinking about tools.

We need something similar for AI. Not another tutorial on prompt engineering or another breathless prediction about AGI. We need frameworks for living wisely in an AI-saturated world.

Here's what I think that includes:

Cognitive Sovereignty: Understanding which mental muscles to preserve and which to willingly let atrophy. Being intentional about what we outsource. Creating personal protocols for when to use AI and when to deliberately choose the harder path.

Friction Design: Deliberately introducing productive difficulty back into our lives. Choosing when to struggle, when to flow. Building what I call "cognitive gyms," spaces where we practice unaugmented thinking like musicians practice scales.

Orchestration Literacy: Learning to think in systems, flows, and feedback loops. Understanding ourselves as nodes in larger intelligence networks. Developing the meta-skill of designing intelligence flows rather than just participating in them.

Integration Ethics: Developing principles for how we merge with AI while preserving what makes us essentially human. Not just "AI ethics" in the abstract, but personal codes for living with ambient intelligence.

This isn't about resistance or acceleration. It's about integration with intention.

If This Is Just the Beginning

We stand at an inflection point that's easy to miss because it doesn't announce itself with fanfare. AI seeps rather than disrupts. It absorbs rather than replaces.

The 180 million people using ChatGPT today are not just using a tool. They're participating in the largest behavioral experiment in human history. Each interaction subtly rewires expectations, habits, and capabilities. Multiply that by hundreds of millions, iterate daily, and you begin to see the scope of what's happening.

The question isn't whether AI will change us. It already is. The question is whether we'll be conscious participants in that change or unconscious subjects of it.

I'm not here to sell you on AI or warn you away from it. I'm here as someone building in the middle of this shift, watching it happen in real-time, trying to make sense of patterns that don't yet have names.

What I know is this: The tools we're building today will become the water we swim in tomorrow. The habits we form now will become the culture we inhabit next. The choices we make about our relationship with machine intelligence will ripple forward in ways we can barely imagine.

So yes, this is the beginning. Not of AI, that ship has sailed. This is the beginning of consciously co-evolving with it. Of being deliberate about which frictions we preserve and which we release. Of becoming thoughtful orchestrators of our own cognitive futures.

The future isn't about AI becoming more human. It's about humans becoming something new. Not less than we were, but different than we've been.

And that transformation? It's not waiting for us in some distant tomorrow. It's happening right now, in this moment, with every one of those 500 million daily messages.

The only question is: Will we shape it, or will it shape us?

I think we still have a choice. But that window won't stay open forever.

Those 500 million daily messages exchanged with ChatGPT? They aren't just queries. They're quiet architecture, rebuilding how we relate to thought, to each other, and to what it means to be human.