A higher bar than efficiency
Speed matters, but it is an incomplete measure of progress. A system can make a process faster while making its users less informed, less capable, or less able to challenge a poor outcome. Efficiency without agency is a brittle kind of improvement.
What agency looks like
A tool increases agency when it makes the important parts of a situation easier to see. It offers a path to understand why, not only what. It preserves meaningful choice and gives people a way to recover when the default is wrong.
Tools should teach
The most enduring technologies make their users more capable over time. They reveal a model of the problem, reward curiosity, and allow people to move from consumer to participant. This is one reason open systems matter: they invite inspection, adaptation, and ownership.
Design for judgment
The future of work is not a contest between people and machines. It is a design question about where each should contribute. Machines are excellent at scale, recall, and consistency. People remain responsible for context, values, and judgment. Strong systems make that boundary explicit.
A positive standard
When I evaluate a new technology, I return to a simple question: does this expand the set of meaningful things a person can do? It is not the only question, but it is a clarifying one. Progress should leave us with more capacity to understand our world and more confidence to shape it.