The Only Commodity

AI Trilogy Part Two

There is only one human commodity.

Time.

Everything else is derivative. Money is stored time. Status is borrowed time. Comfort is time without pain. Efficiency is time reallocated. Even health, at its core, is runway.

Strip it down and that’s the whole war.

I am fighting on two fronts at once. I want to extend my time on earth; and I want the time I have to be vivid, dense, electric. Those two ambitions do not always cooperate. The behaviors that lengthen life can sand down its intensity. The behaviors that intensify life sometimes burn runway. That tension is not a flaw; it is the game.

This is where AI enters the frame, and where most people miss the point.

We are told the future is about efficiency. Automation. Removing friction. Anticipating needs before we know we have them. A life where nothing hurts your ass and nothing is forgotten and nothing is inconvenient.

I have already lived in a place where all my needs were met before I could articulate them. It was called a womb.

I am not interested in going back.

I do not want all my chores taken from me. I do not want every sharp edge rounded off. My brain does not run on a diet of “heavy problems only.” It needs to brush teeth. It needs to choose clothes. It needs to negotiate relationships. It needs to book tickets and remember birthdays and feel the low hum of ordinary responsibility. Those small acts are not inefficiencies; they are metabolic exercise. They maintain authorship.

A life stripped of minutiae is not liberated; it is abstracted.

We keep talking about “agents,” as if the goal were to build something with agency. Why would I want that? We are not extending the franchise. I do not need a new sovereign intelligence roaming around with its own intentions. I need instruments. I need leverage. I need amplification without abdication.

The industrial instinct, of course, is brute force. We throw power at the problem. More compute. More parameters. More context. It is a very human move. It works. It scales. But it tells you something about the selection pressure shaping the system. Capital optimizes for speed and dominance; evolution optimized for survival under constraint.

And that is where the brain analogy both helps and misleads.

The eye is a terrible camera. It is wired backwards; it has a blind spot; its high resolution is confined to a tiny patch. A decent modern sensor humiliates it on paper. But the brain does something extraordinary: it takes sparse input and hallucinates coherence. It predicts. It fills in. It renders selectively.

Now we build cameras that track your gaze and render only what you are looking at in full resolution. We call it innovation. The eye pulled that trick millions of years ago.

The lesson is not that biology is perfect. It is that biology is efficient under constraint. Cheap sensors; aggressive inference.

Still, why pattern our cognitive future on a system optimized for generalization and survival in tribal Africa? We now have cameras that can capture events at attosecond scales. An attosecond is a quintillionth of a second. There are more attoseconds in a single second than there are seconds between the Big Bang and this moment. We can now watch electron movement unfold at that scale, watching matter rearrange itself almost at the speed of physics.

If measurement were the goal, engineering has already outrun biology by absurd margins.

But measurement is not the goal.

Navigation is.

Precision does not eliminate ambiguity. More resolution does not answer the question of what matters. It does not choose the goal. It does not weigh tradeoffs under mortality. That is where inference enters.

Even so, I am not chasing comfort or efficiency. Beyond a chair that does not injure me, I am done with comfort as a primary aim. What I want is range. I want amplitude. I want novelty.

I want newer, better answers every day. I want my light shinier. I want my sugar sweeter. I want my experience to accelerate.

Novelty stretches time. It increases density. A year of repetition collapses into blur; a year of transformation feels long. When people say they want AI to save time, I suspect many of them actually want AI to intensify it.

But novelty alone is not enough. Raw mutation without selection becomes noise. If every stimulus is maximal, none of it lands. The shine normalizes. The sugar dulls the tongue.

Acceleration must be paired with integration.

What I am really after is an increase in the rate at which I become someone new… without dissolving who I already am.

AI can help there, if used properly. It can increase the mutation rate of ideas. It can recombine disciplines at absurd speed. It can collapse search costs so that more of my hours are spent in engagement rather than frictional lookup. It can surface blind spots and second-order consequences. It can widen the field of possible nights.

But it should not anesthetize me.

It should not silently optimize my life into smoothness. A completely optimized life risks becoming thin. Friction creates contrast. Contrast creates memory. Memory creates the sensation of length. A perfectly efficient existence might paradoxically feel shorter.

Kris Kristofferson once sang that there’s still a lot of wine and lonely girls in this best of all possible worlds.

That line is not naive optimism. It is defiant gratitude. The world is flawed, finite, sometimes brutal; and still it offers intoxication, intimacy, texture. It offers heat.

Extending time matters because there are still nights left. Intensifying time matters because those nights can burn bright.

So if I use AI, it is not to construct a cognitive womb. It is to build a vineyard.

I want tools that sharpen me, not tools that replace me. Systems that increase the density of my lived hours. Systems that make tradeoffs explicit so that when I choose vividness over safety, or safety over vividness, I know what I am doing.

There is only one commodity.

Time not in pain.

Time not in unconscious drift.

Time not lost to dull repetition.

Time spent awake.

If the future is worth building, it is because it increases the amount of conscious, self-authored, vivid time available to a human being… and because it extends the runway just enough that the compounding matters.

Anything else is just furniture.

And I did not come here for furniture.

My aim is an ever improving Doug. If I play my cards right… a Douglas someday.

Someday. 😉