“What shall I make?”

When I was a younger man, I had this little phrase that I kept close to my heart. I didn’t say it often, but I would come back to it when I felt lost in the sea of adult life—drudgery, hustle, responsibility.

“Make things beautiful and make beautiful things.”

It was a way of remembering who I was. The version of me that felt like an artist, who had big dreams, a little bit of flair, and a soul he let other people see freely and shake hands with.

Surprisingly, AI is helping bring that version of me back to life. At first, I let it create for me, and I didn’t like it. It felt hollow. It had no soul, and it wasn’t any fun. So I stopped letting it do that.

But now I use it differently. It helps me create more, and spend less time on the parts that aren’t that fun. It clears space instead of taking over.

And in a world where we suddenly have these power tools—tools to imagine, design, refine, build, and share, cheaply and almost delightfully—the biggest question shifts. It’s no longer “can I make this?” but “what shall I make?”

There’s so much I would love to make beautiful, or just make more beautiful, and more of it feels within reach than ever. My own watch straps. New variations of pizza dough. Another book. Choreography. A family cookbook. A trellis for the tomatoes in the backyard.

Tools aren’t really the constraint anymore. The limit now is more human than that—our imagination, our point of view, our ability to notice something and say, that’s worth making.

That’s why the humanities and the arts feel more valuable than ever to me. Not instead of STEM, but alongside it. We need to understand the world, the tools, and what’s worth doing with them.

If we can stay curious, be empathetic, and keep teaching ourselves, we can create a lot. But only if we have some sense of what is beautiful—or at least, if we’re willing to wrestle with that question.

That’s also why I think, perhaps paradoxically, that AI and robots might actually make us more human. Because the alternative to leaning into our humanity isn’t scarcity and poverty. It’s something worse—a kind of boredom that comes from having endless possibility, but no idea what to do with it.

Wouldn’t it be something if AI and robots ended up being the greatest catalyst for beauty humanity has ever known? It might be optimistic. But I think it’s possible.

But have to choose it. We could do a lot of destructive stuff with all of this, or we could commit to making things beautiful, and making beautiful things. And if we’re serious about that, then it becomes pretty important—for us, and for our kids—to wrestle with a deeper question: what is beautiful? Not in a shallow way, but in a way that is personal, soulful, and human.