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For most of history, our choices were governed by constraints.
We could only travel as fast as our transport allowed. We could only communicate as far as our technology could reach. We could only produce as much as our time, money, knowledge, and physical ability permitted.
Technology has spent centuries removing those constraints.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating that process.
Today, I can ask AI to generate fifty ideas, design ten interfaces, write thousands of words, analyse enormous amounts of information, create images, build software, and automate work that once required specialist knowledge.
The question is slowly changing from “Can I do this?” to “Should I do this?”
When everything becomes possible
For decades, becoming a good graphic, UI, or UX designer required learning the craft. You studied typography, hierarchy, colour, spacing, grids, usability, software, and countless other details.
AI does not make those principles irrelevant. But it dramatically reduces the effort required to execute them.
Show an AI a well-designed interface and it can increasingly understand its structure, identify its components, recognise the patterns being used, and create something based on similar principles.
When you can generate one solution, production is valuable. When you can generate a hundred solutions, curation becomes valuable.
You can do anything.
But you cannot do everything.
Constraint and restraint
A constraint is something that limits you.
A restraint is a limit you choose for yourself.
If I only have enough money to build one product, that is a constraint.
If AI allows me to build ten products but I deliberately choose to concentrate on one, that is restraint.
I encounter this when building small digital tools. AI makes it remarkably easy to keep adding features simply because I can. The harder decision is recognising when the tool already does what it needs to do and stopping.
As technology removes more constraints, we may need to develop more restraint.
Otherwise abundance simply becomes excess.
More content. More features. More products. More notifications. More automation. More choices.
More activity without producing more progress.
The value of friction
This connects with something I have written about before: the Deliberate Friction Principle.
Technology allows us to remove effort from our lives, but not every form of effort is undesirable.
Sometimes walking instead of driving is worthwhile. Sometimes working through a problem ourselves matters. Sometimes reading the long version gives us something that a summary cannot.
The Deliberate Friction Principle asks:
Which forms of effort should we preserve even when technology can remove them?
The Restraint Principle asks a different question:
Which possibilities should we decline even when technology makes them available?
One protects capability.
The other protects judgement.
But restraint is not automatically wisdom. Too much can become timidity or an excuse not to experiment.
Abundance needs governance
Restraint is a form of self-governance.
A person can choose restraint. An organisation can turn restraint into policy. A society can turn restraint into law.
At that point, collective restraint becomes an individual constraint.
Jurassic Park captured the problem perfectly: the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they failed to spend enough time considering whether they should.
The dinosaurs were fictional. The principle wasn’t.
The new scarcity
For a long time, capability was scarce.
Knowing how to design or build something was valuable because most people couldn’t. Specialised knowledge was valuable because it was difficult to obtain.
AI is making capability abundant.
That doesn’t make human judgement worthless. It may make it more valuable.
When everybody can generate something beautiful, taste determines what is worth keeping.
When everybody can produce content, judgement determines what is worth saying.
When everybody can build products, understanding determines what is worth building.
When every possibility is available, restraint determines which possibility deserves our attention.
We spent centuries developing tools to overcome our limitations.
Now we may have to become equally good at deciding when not to use them.
Scarcity governs through constraint.
Abundance must be governed through restraint.
