I miss buttons.
Not in a nostalgic, vinyl-records kind of way. I mean the actual, physical certainty of pressing something and knowing it worked. The mechanical click. The tactile feedback. The control.
We've moved through eras of interaction with technology. First, mechanical — physical buttons, switches, dials. You pressed, it responded. Then tactile — touchscreens that mimicked the feeling of control, even as the buttons disappeared. Now we're entering something else entirely. Voice commands. Gestures. Interfaces that vanish. And with them, a creeping discomfort I couldn't name at first.
Technophobe, maybe? Not in the traditional sense — I'm not afraid of technology. I'm afraid of its absence. The disappearing interface. The loss of something to hold onto.
But I've started to think I was afraid of the wrong thing.
The Age of Abundance
I watched a conversation between Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak from the UK's AI Safety Summit. Musk described a future where AI creates an "age of abundance" — where, eventually, no job is needed. Sunak pushed back gently: I'm someone who believes work gives you meaning.
Both are right. And both are talking past each other.
Work does give meaning — but not the work we've been doing. Not the emails, the formatting, the endless operational tasks that fill our days but empty our minds. That's not meaning. That's maintenance.
What if AI isn't here to take our jobs, but to take back the parts of our jobs that were never really ours to begin with?
The mechanical. The repetitive. The things we do not because they matter, but because someone has to.
If that's true, then the fear of losing control — of becoming a technophobe in a world with no buttons — misses the point entirely.
Becoming Techno-Native
The real opportunity isn't about interfaces at all. It's about becoming something new: techno-native. Not someone who fears technology or even uses it well, but someone native to a world where technology handles the ground floor — freeing humans to live where we belong.
In art. In ideas. In innovation. In the kind of competition that isn't about getting things done faster, but about pushing each other to think bigger.
Work shouldn't be about doing things. It should be about creating things.
And maybe that's what buttons were holding us back from all along.