I don't need you to take meeting notes. I don't want a tl;dr of your email. You don't need to update Salesforce for me.

I no longer have to work from secondhand, filtered, and summarized information. For decades, the price of working together at scale has been conformity. We were asked to fit our minds into rigid, one-size-fits-all systems that drained the joy from our work and squeezed our individuality out of the process.

But now, I want the raw material—the full context, the complete idea, the unfiltered thought. My brain works best when I build my own mental model, not when I have to borrow yours (nothing against you and yours).

This is the future of work that AI enables. It finally breaks the long-standing compromise between collaboration and conformity. AI can act as a universal translator between our unique, subjective ways of thinking and the shared landscape of our team's work. We can all interact with the same information, but in a way that is completely native to each of us.

This shift brings a profound sense of freedom. It’s the freedom to solve a worthwhile problem on your own terms, to make connections others might miss, and to more easily enter that beautiful and much-needed flow state. It brings the potential for actual joy back into our work.

As the philosopher Peter Rollins says, "subjectivity is freedom." Your experience of freedom is the experience of your own subjectivity.

After helping start a Human-AI collaboration startup, I’m convinced it’s the future. It’s valuing our individual diversity. It's a step-change in our creative outlet. It's a triumphant return to joy at work.

Or it has the potential to be, anyway.