Opinion | I can’t wait for AI to be boring

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We are living through a moment that feels historic. Artificial intelligence is new enough to feel magical, powerful enough to feel unsettling and loud enough to dominate every conversation about the future. It dazzles. It disrupts. It demands attention.

But I can’t wait for the day it doesn’t.

I can’t wait for AI to be boring.

Not because it failed — but because it succeeded.

Right now, AI feels like a spectacle. Something you use. Something you marvel at. But history tells us that the technologies that truly change the world don’t stay spectacular forever. They disappear.

The best technology doesn’t demand attention. It removes friction.

Think about eating a great steak with a dull knife. You’re aware of the resistance, the sawing, the effort. The knife becomes part of the experience — and not in a good way. But give yourself a sharp blade and something remarkable happens: You stop thinking about the knife entirely. You taste the steak more clearly. The tool disappears, and what matters comes into focus.

That’s the future I want for AI.

The real test of artificial intelligence won’t be how clever it sounds or how impressive its demos look. It will be whether it becomes so intuitive, so integrated and so reliable that we barely notice it at all. When it helps us think without announcing itself. When it clarifies instead of distracts. When it supports human intention rather than competing for attention.

All great technology, whether it intends to or not, seeks invisibility.

But history gives us a useful lens.

Every major technological leap of the last 5,000 years began inefficiently. Early engines wasted fuel. Early factories polluted rivers. Early electrical grids were crude and uneven. Progress didn’t come from abandoning those technologies — it came from demanding that they improve. Efficiency wasn’t a side effect. It became the goal.

The same pressure will shape AI.

The future of artificial intelligence cannot be endless scale for its own sake. It has to be measured in impact per watt, not raw power. It has to reward models that do less computation to achieve more understanding. It has to move away from brute-force centralization and toward intelligence that mirrors the efficiency of the human brain itself.

Our brains are astonishingly powerful — and they run on roughly 20 watts. Not because they’re magical, but because evolution optimized them relentlessly around efficiency. That’s the blueprint AI must follow if it’s going to deserve a permanent place in human life.

It will run increasingly on renewable energy not because it’s fashionable, but because waste will no longer make economic sense. It will be so well modeled after human cognition that much of it can live locally on our devices, quietly assisting without constant trips to distant servers. The cloud won’t disappear — but it will be used deliberately, not reflexively.

That’s the deeper test.

Not whether AI can astonish us — but whether it can coexist with the planet that hosts us. Whether the symbiosis we feel in our minds can extend outward, aligning intelligence with ecology instead of extracting from it. Whether the same design principles that make tools intuitive for a 10-year-old can also make them gentle on the world they inhabit.

I can’t wait for AI to be boring.

Because boring is what we call technology that has learned how to belong.