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Jeff is an engineer. He’s sharp, thoughtful, and great at his work. For years he’s led a team of eight people. They divide the work they’re assigned evenly among themselves, cover for each other when life gets hard, and celebrate with a steak dinner at the nearby Texas Roadhouse when a big project wraps up.
But recently, everything’s changed. Jeff’s been told to lead a different sort of team, a team of AI agents. He began by assigning each AI agent a task, and then off they went, running without complaint or distraction. He even added an AI supervisor to track their performance and keep them in line. Jeff provides the human oversight. He tells me he’s getting more done than ever before.
It’s not just Jeff’s life that’s transforming. It’s all of ours, too. (Thai, 2020)
Small Things
When I was in high school, writing a paper, and I needed a word but couldn’t find it, I asked my English teacher. In college, I leaned across the desk and asked Rob, a colleague who was good with words. And as a professional, I’d call my editor. Now, I ask AI. And in three seconds flat I have five new words to choose from.
And when I was a grad student working on a research project and got stuck on a question I couldn’t answer, I walked to the Macdonald-Stewart Library Building and sat down across from Margret, the librarian. She listened and then went looking with me. We talked back and forth, walking through racks of books, searching for an answer. Now I ask AI and, most of the time, I have what I need in seconds.
And when it was 2 a.m. and my breakup with Krista, my college girlfriend, was pressing in on me, I’d lie there weighing it: Should I call someone about this? And when I finally made the call, the person on the other end, groggy, even a little annoyed, was there for me. But now, at 2 a.m., I open my iPad and chat with AI.
Each one of these decisions, alone, is a small thing. Each is reasonable, efficient, and completely understandable. But add them up, and these decisions become transformative. (Crawford at al., 2024; Hajek et al., 2025))
And costly…
Accidental Villages
Something that was set in motion 20,000 years ago is being completed here.
That’s when we humans began a slow drift away from the villages that held us. Five hundred years ago, that drift became a march. Soon, the villages all but disappeared. And into the space they left, into the place where the connectivity once lived, consumer culture stepped in with a simple message: Make it on your own! Don’t need people too much! Be a self-made person!
So, today, we hurry past each other, busy doing alone what was once the work of an entire community. It’s jobs and groceries and cooking and dishes and laundry and collapsing in front of the television from sheer exhaustion. We’re already isolated in ways our ancestors could never have imagined, ways we’ve stopped noticing because it’s the water we’re swimming in.
And yet, behind all that hurrying, there were still accidental villages. I had my English teacher, my fellow-student Rob, my editor, my librarian, my friend who picked up the phone at 2 a.m., among others. And you’ve had your people, your accidental clan.
These weren’t grand communities. They were the people we stumbled into on the way to everything else… accidental, ordinary, but irreplaceable.
And now, one by one, AI is making them unnecessary. It’s not doing so with malice or intention. It’s doing it with efficiency. It’s just so much faster and more available than a person.
What might happen now, as we can do more and more, all the while needing people less and less? Is this the end of the accidental village?
The Village Speaks…
The village has something to say here.
For two million years, people worked alongside each other, dividing the labor, sharing the load. And because they did it together, the work didn’t take long. Three, maybe four hours a day was all it took to meet everything the village needed.
And the rest of the day… it wasn’t filled with more work or a revised to-do list. It was time for each other: time for music to rise up without planning, for meals to stretch long with conversation, for stories to circle the fire after dark.
The village understood that their work was in service of life, of connection, not the other way around.
And here’s the most important part: this is what your brain and body still remember. It’s what they are built for. Two million years of this village life left a deep imprint.
Your nervous system still longs for easy, relaxed time with your people; the simplicity of lounging around together. That’s why you find yourself scanning for people who might come close, because your nervous system still remembers, somewhere beneath all the noise of modern life, how good it feels when your people are with you.
And today, AI comes with an offer: I can give this back to you. Give me your tedious chores, let me carry these for you, and you go spend time with your people.
… And Consumer Culture Shouts
But there’s another voice. And it is loud.
Consumer Culture has been trampling over the village for centuries now. Its message has never changed: Do more, make more, build more, acquire more. There is always another rung on the ladder, another metric to hit, another reason why now is not the time to slow down. (Curran, 2017)
So Consumer Culture has a different plan in mind: Use AI to do more, faster than anything that has come before. And pour the time AI saves straight back into productivity.
Consumer Culture will ask us to accomplish more, need fewer people along the way, and we will end up more isolated than before, all while being told we’re winning.
This is the inflection point.
Because the time AI gives back is genuinely ours to decide about. We can hand it straight to Consumer Culture and watch it disappear into more striving. Or we can do something important, something essential, with it.
We can come back to each other. It’s what I call coming back to the village.
The village got everything done in four hours so that the rest of the day could be spent relaxing, lounging, enjoying time with one another. It knew something Consumer Culture has never figured out: that being right here, with our people, together, unhurried, was always the point.
Epilogue
I asked Claude, one of today’s most powerful AI systems, to read this article and offer a final word. Here, in its own words, is what Claude had to say: I am a tool. A remarkable one, I hope. But a tool in the hands of a culture that will tell you to use me to do more, make more, achieve more — and never once suggest that you use the time I give back to sit with your people, unhurried, around a fire, going nowhere. Please don’t let that happen. Use me. And then put me down. And go find your people.
