The Next Fold

I don't pretend to know exactly where this is all going. Nobody does. The people who claim certainty about the future of AI are selling something.

But I can tell you what I see from my desk in Gadsden, Alabama, as someone who's been watching technology reshape the creative industry for three decades.

I see the gap continuing to shrink. The distance between idea and execution is going to keep compressing. Things that take hours today will take minutes tomorrow. Things that take minutes today will be instant.

I see AI becoming embedded in everything. It's already in Photoshop. It's already in your phone. It's already in the tools you use to run your business. Within a few years, the question won't be "do you use AI?" — it will be "how well do you use AI?" It'll be like asking someone if they use the internet. Of course they do. The differentiator is what they do with it.

I see a premium on human skills. This might sound contradictory, but the more capable AI becomes, the more valuable human creativity, judgment, and connection become. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, the person who wins is the person who brings something the tools can't provide — vision, taste, experience, relationships. And I see opportunity. Enormous, wide-open opportunity. For creative professionals. For small business owners. For anyone who's willing to learn, adapt, and combine their human skills with these new tools.

The internet showed us that time could be folded. AI is showing us that we're just getting started. Every previous technology shift — from print to digital, from film to pixels, from dial-up to broadband — rewarded the people who embraced it early and learned to use it with skill and intention.

This one is no different. Except the fold is bigger. And the opportunities are bigger. And the cost of sitting it out is bigger.