There’s this Louis CK bit from 2008 that’s been stuck in my head lately. He’s on Conan, talking about how we live in an incredible time but everyone’s miserable. He talks about being on a plane with WiFi, literally flying through the air while browsing the internet, and the guy next to him complaining that it’s slow. “What are you, an astronaut?” Louis asks. “You’re sitting in a CHAIR. In the SKY.”
It’s been almost 20 years since, and it’s still the case. We’re living through a genuine technological revolution, the kind that will be in history books, and our collective response is… complaining about it on social media.
The Actual Magic We’re Living Through
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
If you think about it, we have self-driving cars are on public roads, space rockets that land themselves, Internet connectivity in the most remote places transmitted via satellites, blood tests that can detect different types of cancer and AI that can write, code and create every form of media…
We used to think about Google search as the world information in your fingertips, but that was just information retrieval of something that already existed. Now you can literally ask a language model that can explain quantum physics to you like an 8 year old, from the point of view of a scientist or in Klingon if you wish, even if that was never written before.
We can edit genes with CRISPR and 3D print organs and our airpods can translate a conversation in real time… Oh yeah, and we are starting to see humanoid robots that can fold laundry and cook. This is not a futuristic science fiction movie, it’s our day to day reality and it’s accessible for most of the developed world.
And Yet…
It’s easy to take it all for granted.
We get annoyed when ChatGPT takes a few seconds longer to think or when our Waymo decided to take the longer route. What about the airpods not immediately pairing to our phones when we just used them on the laptop? so annoying! We’re living in a science fiction novel, and the biggest problem is often that our incredible tools aren’t quite perfect yet.
The problem, as Louis C.K. pointed out, is that we rapidly re-calibrate “amazing” to “default.” A technological wonder quickly becomes a basic utility, and any minor flaw in its execution is treated as an existential crisis. When technology becomes ubiquitous, it stops feeling like magic and starts feeling like infrastructure. And when infrastructure fails, we’re annoyed. That’s human nature.
Next time you’re about to complain about your AI giving you a weird answer, we need to pause for a second to realise that we’re living in a time of incredible progress. Progress has become invisible because it’s normal. But take a moment to appreciate that we’re living in one of the most extraordinary periods in human history.
Everything is indeed amazing. Not perfect, of course, and there’s plenty more to do. But as I look for the next unicorn with the next 10x improvement it’s easy to ignore the 1,000x improvement that occurred just in the last 3 years. We need to let ourselves be amazed a bit more.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – April 10 2026 - April 10, 2026
- New Firgun Newsletter – April 3 2026 - April 3, 2026
- $3.1 Billion Under Missile Fire: What Q1 2026 Tells Us About Israeli Tech’s Real Resilience - March 31, 2026
