Less is more

Pramod V

3 min read

·

Sep 29, 2026

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AI, AI, AI everywhere! It seems like I am being carried by a huge wave, not knowing where it leads, and am trying to stay afloat.

What a time to be alive, where, the one thing we humans are too proud of is being commoditized like its yet another packet of chips that one may find in the supermarket — intelligence, intellect! whatever you want to call it.

This post is just a means for me to gather, structure and rant my thoughts on this topic. Disclaimer — I am nobody, not a tech guru, not a startup founder, just another engineer with some opinions who is in the space of commoditizing services with AI. So take it with a pinch (or even a tub!) of salt!

Staying true to the article’s title, I do not want to waste much tokens (models are busy doing that anyway!) but will try to come straight to the point.

I have moved from developing solutions, to developing AI solutions, and now developing AI solutions with AI! It feels a bit weird, from a collectives’ perspective —Assuming all the AIs in the world is One Mega-AI, its like we build stuff with AI for AI to build more stuff with AI. And WE are the at the center of this recursion which improves the Mega-AI.

So A does some work W1 with AI -> passes it to B -> B does some more work W2 with AI again and this continues....

Essentially if everyone is using AI you might as well do,

current_work = None
members = [A, B, C, D, E....]
for _ in range (len(members)):
  current_work = AI.do_work(current_work)

In the end, the giant piece of current_work is essentially a training point fed back to the www so Mega-AI can improve.

All this feels to me like, am being made to taste some of the finest wines and extravagant delicacies of the world while my taste buds dont work. I try to taste the satisfaction, but its all bland :D

So, if creating and doing work has no or minimal value, what else can I do (I still need to pay my bills unless I am once again being carried by a huge wave but this time its to a freaking Utopic city! where “To Be is To Work 😌” :D ) ?

More often than not, I see the idea of “More is Good” being sold to me everywhere. I go to buy stuff that I need, my mind starts playing tricks like, life only makes sense if I have that one useless article, snack etc. I talk to a financial representative about a query, I am being told its borderline crime to not have that 1 limited platinum offer, and that life only makes sense if I have that policy… So is adding more stuff to my life the only way to make it better?

And I see this in every other firm, to add more stuff to please the investors. And with AI, years worth of stuff can be added in days or weeks! But is this the right train of thoughts? Are we, humans, just a spending potential to be sold stuff that we might not need? May be there is a better way to quantify a firm’s worth. May be by assessing the qualities of lives (QoL) of its customers and not just their spends. Ofcourse this QoL is a challenging and subjective thing to quantify but I think its a worthwhile and long lasting effort. Its like you change the perception at the fundamental level and the rest falls in its place like dominos. But ofcourse this also means the world needs to stop thinking interms of hoarding (more for me!)

But anyway, coming back to the real world, with the above ideas although seemingly ideal, may be this is already an opportunity for me, who is contributing to adding more and more, to start realizing less is actually more. May be this is where I Force myself in, during the process of creation (as anyway creation has gotten cheaper) and start questioning the validity of something being created (until am thrown out of this loop!). May be we ought to pause and do:

current_work = None
members = [A, B, C, D]
for member in members:
  if member.is_valid(current_work) and 
  member.do_we_need_this(current_work) and 
  member.can_we_keep_it_minimal(current_work) and 
  member.can_we_take_a_step_back(current_work) and 
  member.what_do_the_users_want(current_work) and
  ....
  ...
  ..
  :
    current_work = AI.do_work(current_work)
  

Thanks.