Why does AI feel terrifying to some people and exciting to others?

Because the reaction tends to track the size of your ambition. Our fear of the future is roughly proportional to how small our plans are. If your entire plan is to keep doing exactly what you do today, then a machine that does the same thing faster and cheaper genuinely is a threat — you’re competing with it on the axis where it’s strongest. But if your plan is to build something dramatically bigger, something you couldn’t have attempted before, that same machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten. The technology doesn’t decide which reaction you have; your ambition does. Fear is a zero-sum response to what is actually a positive-sum moment.

What does “don’t boil the ocean” mean, and why retire it now?

“Don’t boil the ocean” is classic business advice against taking on something impossibly large — it keeps teams focused and prevents scope creep, and in normal times it’s wise. The argument for retiring it is that these aren’t normal times: the cost of building, exploring, and iterating has fallen so far that a whole category of once-impossible ambitions has become an engineering problem with a real path. When the tooling makes huge goals tractable, the habit of always shrinking scope becomes a liability. You don’t have to boil the whole ocean on day one — but you can start with a few lakes that used to be unthinkable.

Will AI create more jobs or fewer?

History and economics both lean toward more, for two reasons. The first is ephemeralization — Buckminster Fuller’s 1938 term for doing more and more with less and less; he traced it through bridges (stone to iron to steel, each stronger and cheaper) and saw not job destruction but civilization expanding its own capability. The second is the Jevons paradox : when you make a resource far more efficient, demand for it explodes rather than shrinks — cheaper steam engines made coal so useful that consumption soared. The same is poised to happen with intelligence and labour. The catch is that this expansion isn’t automatic; it only happens when people raise their ambitions enough to use the new abundance, rather than just doing the same small thing slightly cheaper.

I’m not a founder — how do I actually respond to the AI moment?

The direction is the same for everyone: aim higher. If you trade your labour for a living, this is the moment to become a builder — the leverage that used to need a whole team to design, code, write, research, and ship is increasingly available to one determined person, so start the thing and grow a side project into a business. If you already hold capital or a management role, go far more ambitious: stop chasing 5% efficiency gains and 2% margin bumps from cutting headcount, and ask what it would take to build something so good people would gladly pay many times more. The single most useful reframe is to stop asking “how do I do my current job a bit cheaper?” and start asking “what could I build that I never dared attempt before?”

What is the Jevons paradox and why does it matter for AI?

The Jevons paradox is the observation that making a resource dramatically more efficient tends to increase total use of it, not decrease it. The classic example: more efficient steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption — they made coal so useful that demand exploded. Applied to AI, it suggests that as intelligence and labour become cheaper and more capable, we won’t want less of what they produce; we’ll want vastly more, in products and services that were never economical to build before, because human appetite for better things is effectively limitless. The crucial caveat is that the paradox doesn’t activate on its own — it requires people to actually raise their ambitions and reach for the new abundance, instead of using the efficiency to quietly do the same small thing for less.

Your Fear of AI Is the Size of Your Ambition: Why It’s Time to Aim Dramatically Bigger

Two people can look at the same AI breakthrough and feel opposite things — terror or fuel — and the difference reveals something uncomfortable: our fear of the future is roughly the size of our ambition. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you do, a machine that does it cheaper is frightening. If your plan is to build something dramatically bigger, it’s the best news you’ve ever gotten. This is a clear, energising case for retiring “don’t boil the ocean,” trading the 1.05x present for the 10x future, and why — through ephemeralization and the Jevons paradox — raising your ambitions tends to create more, not less.

By Nguyen Le PhongJune 3, 202611 min read

AI
Future of Work
Ambition
Entrepreneurship
AI Era
Personal Growth

Our fear of the future is roughly the size of our ambition. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you do, a machine that does it faster and cheaper is terrifying. If your plan is to build something dramatically bigger, it’s the best news you’ve ever gotten.

Show the same AI breakthrough to two people and you’ll often get two opposite reactions. One feels a cold dread — this could take my job. The other feels a jolt of fuel — this lets me finally build the thing. Same technology, same demo, opposite emotion. The interesting question isn’t which reaction is correct. It’s what the reaction quietly reveals about the size of the dream behind it.

You know the old advice: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone has said it in some over-ambitious meeting. In normal times it’s wise — it keeps teams focused and prevents scope creep. But these aren’t normal times, and I think it’s time to retire the phrase. The new reality rewards the opposite instinct. We can start with a few lakes first.

The zero-sum trap

When people first see what modern AI can do, the natural reaction is fear: it can do what I do, cheaper, so where does that leave me? It’s an understandable response — and it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment.

Zero-sum thinking assumes a fixed pie: if the machine takes a slice, there’s less left for me. So the goal becomes defensive — do the same work for less, shave 5% off costs, protect the margin, maybe quietly let some people go. That’s the old game, and in a moment like this it’s a losing one, because you’re competing with a tireless machine on the exact axis where it’s strongest: doing the known thing cheaply.

Fear is the size of your ambition

Here’s what I think is really going on underneath the fear. Our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your entire plan is to keep doing precisely what you’re doing today, then of course a tool that does it faster and cheaper feels like a threat. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger — something you couldn’t have attempted before — then that same tool is the best news you’ve ever gotten.

The same breakthrough, two responses. One shrinks you into a game you’ll eventually lose; the other points at a future you couldn’t have built before.

The fork in that picture is the whole story. The zero-sum branch leads to a smaller, more frightened version of what you already do. The positive-sum branch points at a future you genuinely could not have built a few years ago. The technology didn’t decide which branch you’re on. Your ambition did.

The questions that aren’t rhetorical anymore

For most of history, the biggest ambitions were waved away as fantasy. What’s changed is that a whole category of “impossible” questions have quietly become engineering problems with actual paths to a solution. Consider the difference in posture:

The old game (the 1.05x present)	The new game (the 10x future)
Eke out 5% efficiency on what we already do.	Build a product so good people would happily pay 10x what they pay now.
Raise margins 2% by cutting cost and headcount.	Deliver a service 100x better than the incumbent.
Skim a sample of customers in a survey.	Actually talk to every single user and understand every bug in the product.
Accept the returns everyone else accepts.	Ask why the result can’t be several times better — and find the path.

These used to be rhetorical questions — the kind you ask to sound inspiring and then drop. They aren’t rhetorical anymore. “Why can’t this be 10x better?” has become a question you can actually try to answer, with a real plan, because the cost of building, exploring, and iterating just fell through the floor.

From worker to builder

So what do you do with that? The practical answer depends on where you stand today — but it points the same direction for everyone: up.

If you trade your labour for a living, this is the moment to become a builder. The leverage that used to require a whole team — to design, to code, to write, to research, to ship — is increasingly available to one determined person. Start the thing. Build the side project into a business.
If you already hold capital or management, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what you let yourself aspire to. Not 5% efficiency gains. Not a 2% margin bump from firing people. Those are the old games. The real question is: what would it look like to build something so good that people would gladly pay many times what they pay now?

The reframe in one question

Stop asking “how do I do my current job a little cheaper?” Start asking “what could I build that I never dared to attempt before?” The first question makes the machine your competitor. The second makes it your co-founder.

Why this tends to create more, not fewer

The fear assumes that more automation means fewer jobs. History keeps suggesting the opposite, for two reasons worth knowing by name.

The first is what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization” back in 1938: doing more and more with less and less, until eventually you can do almost everything with almost nothing. He traced it through bridges — stone arches to iron trusses to steel cables, each version stronger, longer, lighter, and cheaper. He wasn’t describing the destruction of work. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization. Each leap didn’t shrink human capability; it radically expanded it.

The second is the Jevons paradox. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t end up using less of it — you use vastly more. Cheaper, better steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption; they made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is poised to happen with intelligence and with labour: as they get cheaper and more capable, we won’t want less of what they produce — we’ll want enormously more, because the human appetite for better things is effectively limitless. For the first time, we may actually be able to feed that appetite — if we have the agency to ask for it.

More efficient ≠ less work

This is the Jevons paradox applied to everything. Make intelligence cheap and you don’t get a world that needs less of it — you get a world that suddenly wants it everywhere, in products and services nobody could afford to build before. Abundance creates appetite. Appetite creates work.

But it doesn’t activate on its own

Here’s the catch, and it’s the whole point. The Jevons paradox doesn’t switch itself on. It only fires when people actually raise their ambitions — when capital and management decide to go boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning every bold idea in committee. If everyone just uses the new efficiency to do the same small thing slightly cheaper, the expansion never happens. The abundance is sitting right there; someone has to be ambitious enough to reach for it.

This is exactly what the best startups have always done well: move fast in the face of radical uncertainty, and build for the 10x future while everyone else optimises the 1.05x present. You don’t need a startup to adopt the posture. You just need to stop defending your current slice and start asking what dramatically bigger thing is now within reach.

Key takeaways

Your fear is the size of your ambition. Keep doing exactly what you do, and a cheaper machine is terrifying; aim dramatically bigger, and it’s the best news you’ve had.
Fear is a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment. Competing with a tireless machine at doing the known thing cheaply is the old, losing game.
Retire “don’t boil the ocean.” Trade the 1.05x present (5% efficiency, 2% margin by cutting heads) for the 10x future (something so good people pay many times more).
“Why can’t this be 10x better?” isn’t rhetorical anymore — it’s an engineering question with a path, now that building and iterating got radically cheaper.
If you trade labour, become a builder; if you hold capital or management, go 10x more hardcore on your aspirations.
This tends to create more, not fewer: ephemeralization (more with less) and the Jevons paradox (efficiency explodes demand) point to expansion, not destruction.
But it doesn’t activate on its own. Abundance only unlocks when someone raises their ambition enough to reach for it. Time to start — pick a lake.

The machines are not the story. The story is what you choose to do now that the cost of building the once-impossible has collapsed. You can spend this moment defending a shrinking slice of the present, anxious about a tool that’s better than you at the thing you were planning to keep doing forever. Or you can let it lift your sights — toward the product you never dared to build, the service ten times better than today’s, the lake that everyone said was too big to boil. The fear and the fuel come from the same place. Choose the bigger dream, and the same news that terrifies everyone else becomes the best thing that ever happened to you. Time to start.

What did you think?

Frequently asked questions

Why does AI feel terrifying to some people and exciting to others?: Because the reaction tends to track the size of your ambition. Our fear of the future is roughly proportional to how small our plans are. If your entire plan is to keep doing exactly what you do today, then a machine that does the same thing faster and cheaper genuinely is a threat — you’re competing with it on the axis where it’s strongest. But if your plan is to build something dramatically bigger, something you couldn’t have attempted before, that same machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten. The technology doesn’t decide which reaction you have; your ambition does. Fear is a zero-sum response to what is actually a positive-sum moment.
What does “don’t boil the ocean” mean, and why retire it now?: “Don’t boil the ocean” is classic business advice against taking on something impossibly large — it keeps teams focused and prevents scope creep, and in normal times it’s wise. The argument for retiring it is that these aren’t normal times: the cost of building, exploring, and iterating has fallen so far that a whole category of once-impossible ambitions has become an engineering problem with a real path. When the tooling makes huge goals tractable, the habit of always shrinking scope becomes a liability. You don’t have to boil the whole ocean on day one — but you can start with a few lakes that used to be unthinkable.
Will AI create more jobs or fewer?: History and economics both lean toward more, for two reasons. The first is ephemeralization — Buckminster Fuller’s 1938 term for doing more and more with less and less; he traced it through bridges (stone to iron to steel, each stronger and cheaper) and saw not job destruction but civilization expanding its own capability. The second is the Jevons paradox: when you make a resource far more efficient, demand for it explodes rather than shrinks — cheaper steam engines made coal so useful that consumption soared. The same is poised to happen with intelligence and labour. The catch is that this expansion isn’t automatic; it only happens when people raise their ambitions enough to use the new abundance, rather than just doing the same small thing slightly cheaper.
I’m not a founder — how do I actually respond to the AI moment?: The direction is the same for everyone: aim higher. If you trade your labour for a living, this is the moment to become a builder — the leverage that used to need a whole team to design, code, write, research, and ship is increasingly available to one determined person, so start the thing and grow a side project into a business. If you already hold capital or a management role, go far more ambitious: stop chasing 5% efficiency gains and 2% margin bumps from cutting headcount, and ask what it would take to build something so good people would gladly pay many times more. The single most useful reframe is to stop asking “how do I do my current job a bit cheaper?” and start asking “what could I build that I never dared attempt before?”
What is the Jevons paradox and why does it matter for AI?: The Jevons paradox is the observation that making a resource dramatically more efficient tends to increase total use of it, not decrease it. The classic example: more efficient steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption — they made coal so useful that demand exploded. Applied to AI, it suggests that as intelligence and labour become cheaper and more capable, we won’t want less of what they produce; we’ll want vastly more, in products and services that were never economical to build before, because human appetite for better things is effectively limitless. The crucial caveat is that the paradox doesn’t activate on its own — it requires people to actually raise their ambitions and reach for the new abundance, instead of using the efficiency to quietly do the same small thing for less.