An idea occurs. A few sentences later, something begins to exist: a website, a programme, an image, a plan. We adjust it, extend it, ask for another version. Each result suggests another possibility. The distance between imagining and making seems to contract.
There is pleasure in this. There is also a peculiar restlessness. Finishing one thing leaves us reaching for the next. Whatever resists completion becomes irritating. We begin to experience the time between intention and result as an unnecessary obstruction.
German has a word for an excessive urge to build: Bauwut. It joins Bau, building or construction, with Wut, anger or rage. Its ordinary meaning already captures a frenzy of construction. Duden: Bauwut
What happens when making becomes so easy that the world begins to feel intolerably slow?
The question begins with the direction we give our machines.
My starting premise is that current AI systems have no lived project of their own. They can pursue objectives, carry out sequences of actions and respond to their surroundings. Human purposes, however, arise within an existence in which things matter to us: we are vulnerable, dependent, attached to people and places, aware that our time will end.
This is the sense of being-in-the-world that matters here. We encounter a world already charged with significance. A house can be shelter, inheritance, a burden, the place someone is missing from. Its meaning reaches beyond the tasks that can be performed upon it.
The direction of an AI system is inherited through its design, training, instructions and use. That inheritance already carries values and priorities. Then we bring our particular purposes to it. We ask it to make something, solve something, improve something. We give its capacities a place within our lives.
Yet our purposes change through the encounter.
Once something becomes easy to make, we begin to imagine making it more often. A task that once demanded a serious commitment becomes an afternoon’s experiment. Possibilities multiply. Gradually, the availability of a means begins to influence our choice of ends.
We look at the world differently because we possess a new way of acting upon it.
In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger describes modern technology as a way in which reality becomes disclosed to us. Nature appears as Bestand, usually translated as “standing-reserve”: something available to be ordered and put to use. His example is the Rhine, encountered through the hydroelectric installation as a supplier of power. Gestell, or enframing, names this ordering disclosure. The danger is that other ways of encountering things become obscured, while human beings themselves are drawn into the demand for availability. Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
AI gives this tendency a further reach.
Alongside rivers, forests and minerals, we can approach language, attention, knowledge and imagination as resources awaiting transformation. A conversation offers material for content. An interest suggests a product. A difficulty becomes an opportunity for automation.
Even the parts of life that once seemed peripheral to production become potential inputs.
Under this view, unused possibility starts to resemble waste. An idea left unrealised feels like a missed opportunity. An hour without output appears inefficient. Something that could be built begins to exert a claim upon us simply because building it is possible.
This is where ease can turn into compulsion.
The effort of making has often imposed a pause. We have had to choose which ideas deserved the labour, which ambitions could wait, which projects were worth sustaining. Much of that difficulty has been frustrating and exclusionary. Its reduction can give people the means to do things they have long wanted to do.
But removing effort also removes some of the occasions on which we reconsider our intentions. When the next version is immediately available, reflection can always be postponed until after one more attempt.
We build something. Building it reveals another possibility. That possibility becomes a task. The task creates further demands.
Within a culture already organised around productivity, the capacity to do more can quickly become an expectation to do more. The time saved fills with additional work. Each acceleration establishes the pace from which the next delay is judged.
The Wut enters as impatience with limits.
We become angry at the tool when it misunderstands us, at the process when it requires care, at the world when it fails to yield promptly to our intentions. We become angry with ourselves for having so much capacity available and so little, apparently, to show for it.
The world appears increasingly as something awaiting our intervention. Its resistance becomes a defect.
This is the feedback loop I mean by Bauwut. We direct systems whose purposes are inherited from us; their responsiveness encourages us to regard more of existence as available for transformation. That expanding field of possibility generates further demands, which we return to the systems.
The machine needs no anger of its own. Ours supplies the urgency.
There are things I want to build. Some are useful, some beautiful, some worthwhile simply because making them is a pleasure. The question concerns the place building takes within a life.
Can we still encounter something without immediately proposing its improvement? Can an idea remain a thought? Can time saved remain time available for living?
As our capacity to make grows, choosing an end becomes a greater responsibility. So does recognising when an end has been reached.
Perhaps the most demanding freedom these systems leave us is the freedom to let something be.