Machines of Loving Freedom

Machines set us free. That’s a fact.

Cars gave us unrestricted mobility, washing machines and dishwashers cleaned the things we didn’t want to, you get the point — machines have always liberated humans, and AI is doing the same.

AI is a new kind of machine and it gave me freedoms I did not have before. My days got richer, I started to do more of lots of different things. I am living my best life and doing the best work I ever did.

AI takes the cognitive load off your shoulders. It eats the grind, the meetings, the coordination, the days between an idea and a shipped thing. You have your time back as it works on the thing for you.

I am not talking about a little extra time. I am talking about the first time I felt self-reliant in a deep way. Time stopped being a fight. I could move from one thing to another and just float through an unstructured day — how often does anyone get that? Almost never. There is always a demand on our time; we rarely get to fully spend time with ourselves.

Jensen Huang said AGI has arrived. I can only speak from my own life. Since 2024 I have been living inside this shift, and with every new breakthrough I can pass off more of the labour.

Between May and August 2026, Grant Orb pushed out massive releases: new features, new products, MCP, email marketing, website redesigns, and fun projects like Buy Canada and the FIFA Vancouver Guide. From ideation to visual design to shipped code, most of it happened in a day to two days. Traditionally each of those would have taken 6–9 months and maybe 3 to 5 people working on it.

With AI, while I was getting all the above work done, I was still hitting 20k steps a day. I read 20+ books, word for word, with notes. I cooked from scratch, hunted the freshest ingredients, dried and froze summer produce. I biked. I started climbing, I started clubbing again after a long hiatus, I spent time in nature, I went deep into history, philosophy, art, music and meditation. I got to explore dimensions of myself and new interests I did not know I had.

That is the bigger thing, not direct economic productivity. A life with room in it — room to think, to walk, to cook, to sit, to wonder what we are doing here.

I publish this day-to-day on X if you want the pictures and the texture of it. One last thing: you and I have access to the same AI and the same universe. Space is the limit.

Stop labouring. Start living.

Books I read

The median person reads 2 books a year. I read 21 books in 4 months.

• My Gita — Devdutt Pattanaik
• Accelerando — Charles Stross
• Everyday Utopia — Kristen R. Ghodsee
• Flash Boys — Michael Lewis
• How the Hippies Saved Physics — David Kaiser
• From Third World to First: The Singapore Story — Lee Kuan Yew
• Discovery of India — Nehru
• The Vegetarian — Han Kang
• Future Shock — Alvin Toffler
• Jamsetji Tata: Powerful Learnings for Corporate Success — R. Gopalakrishnan & Harish Bhat
• The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli
• Inside Chanakya’s Mind / Arthashastra
• Things of the Mind — J. Krishnamurti
• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
• Arranging Things
• Monocle Guide to Better Living
• Monocle Guide to Building Better Cities
• On the Road — Jack Kerouac
• The Military Maxims of Napoleon — Napoleon Bonaparte
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
• The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

---

Originally published on Substack — read the original →.