The last decade of software was built to capture attention. The next decade will be built to give it back.

There is a quiet energy among the top builders in Silicon Valley right now. A pull toward simple, almost analog experiences. And yet, these products are more capable than ever before.

Just look at ChatGPT – one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history. What is it, really? A blank field and a cursor. The interface is almost nothing. Yet the power underneath is among the most profound advances in computing we’ve ever seen.

The deeper you go into AI, the more extreme this pattern becomes. AI agents make phone calls, schedule appointments, negotiate—and we never see them move a cursor or fill out a form. Their power is completely invisible. So much so that we have to give them personas to even wrap our heads around what they can do: Claude, Devin, Alice.

Even hardware is bending this direction. OpenAI is reportedly developing consumer devices that are pocket-sized, contextually aware, and possibly screenless.

The philosophy of what makes a great product is shifting. We don’t literally mean that the next wave of startups will be screenless (although it may be possible). We mean that we are moving toward products where the “magic” is that you can set it up, and walk away. Software that just gets it. These tools are almost relaxing to use. 

The most forward-looking AI companies at the app layer have made a key realization: The next generation of products won’t win by capturing attention. They will win by removing the need for attention all together. 

That’s a huge shift. It will change how we measure success. It will change how we work. It will probably change society. In this post, we’ll cover what this philosophy means and where it came from. In the next post, we’ll dig into the tactics of how to build within this new modality.

Technology Tends to Become Invisible Over Time 

Technology tends to become invisible over time. 

In 2014, the Harvard Innovation Lab created a beautiful illustration of this idea. The video opens on a 1980s office desk, replete with computer, calendar, fax machine etc. Over time, each element of the desk disappears – remerging on the desktop as an app. 

We are already on this trajectory. Technology has increasingly become easy to use – the level of friction we encounter thanks to technology today is astonishingly low. (So low that areas of the economy with very high friction – so called “lagging” industries are some of the best places to build startups with AI). 

Invisibility begins with simplicity. 

Simplicity x power is a recipe for a winning product. This was even true before the AI era. Google broke through the cluttered portal wars with a hyper simple homepage atop a revolutionary and hyper powerful search engine.

AI allows us to take this even further. To think very radically about how we design product experiences that are so simple they truly disappear. 

Why? Because AI represents the first time software can truly take complex action without a human supervisor. 

Building Invisible Technology 

So, how do we use AI – and even software – to restore attention? The Silicon Valley history actually gives us a roadmap. 

In 1991, Mark Weiser—who would become known as “the philosopher of Silicon Valley”—wrote about the coming age of “calm technology.” His vision: technology that recedes into the background of life rather than demanding the foreground.

Weiser outlined four principles:

1. The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else
2. The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant
3. The computer should extend your unconscious
4. Technology should create calm

He imagined we were entering the “third wave” of computing: from mainframe to personal computing (person and machine “staring uneasily at each other across the desktop”) to ubiquitous computing, where technology disappears.

Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979 and saw pieces of this vision. The iPhone was an attempt to free us from the desk. But even Jobs couldn’t fully escape the second wave. We just traded the desktop for a different screen – one that followed us everywhere. The attention tax is still high.

AI is what finally makes Weiser’s vision possible, because AI can take action while you walk away. It can listen in the background of a conversation. It can compile information in real time. It can work while you sleep. For the first time, we have technology that genuinely doesn’t need you staring at it to be useful. 

The interface can finally become nothing—a blank field, a voice command, eventually perhaps no interface at all—because the intelligence is doing the work.

The key caveat to consider with the rise of these technologies is privacy. The power of ambient computing is that it doesn’t require constant oversight, but the tradeoff is that users have limited opportunities to opt-out. Many of the founders building in this arena are well aware of this, and for the most part this may not be as big of an issue as it seems.

This is still early. Most founders aren’t building this way yet. But the best ones can feel it. They’re designing for capability that expands your unconscious rather than colonizing your consciousness. It’s a philosophy rather than a form factor. 

Build products so good at their job that they disappear. So intelligent that they don’t need supervision. So valuable that people choose them not because they can’t look away, but because they can finally look up.

The Migration of Complexity

As products become simpler and more invisible on the surface, the complexity of what we can do underneath increases.

The iPhone eliminated dozens of physical devices. Suddenly your most basic needs could be fulfilled with one device. What emerged? We began doing far more complex things than ever before. We broadcast ourselves to millions. We run businesses from our pockets. We stream concerts from across the world and send them to a friend instantly.

The pattern: when technology handles the simple stuff invisibly, human capability migrates upward. We take on more complex ambitions. We spend our cognition on higher-order problems.

AI accelerates this pattern to an extreme we haven’t seen before.

Imagine what becomes possible when you don’t have to supervise the technology:

A company you can build with a team of AI agents working around the clock without your direct oversight. You set the direction. They execute. You review. They iterate. The complexity of running a company remains – but the tedium of management disappears.

Those hours in the car when you travel but don’t drive become hours of deep work, or deep rest, or deep conversation because the AI is handling what used to require your hands and eyes.

Learning compounds when you have a system that tailors a perfect curriculum to your exact knowledge gaps and delivers it in the moments when you’re most receptive. The complexity of mastering a field remains but the inefficiency of random study disappears.

This is not about removing friction to make us lazy – a concern that many have with the rise of AI. Friction for friction’s sake doesn’t help anyone. It just drains resources with little to no return on investment. But well applied friction, as you tackle a complex problem is what leads to progress and learning. 

It’s about removing friction so we can attempt harder things. Not struggle with the boring things. 

The dream of calm technology was never to spend more time in front of screens. It was to create systems that expand your unconscious mind, then let you get on with whatever you were doing before your phone went off.

That’s what becomes possible when products stop demanding attention and start extending capability.

Products that Feel “Like a Walk in The Woods” 

Picture a founder’s day in 2028.

She wakes up and her AI has already triaged overnight messages, flagged the three that need her attention, drafted responses to twelve others, and scheduled two calls based on availability it negotiated with the other party. She never opens email.

During her commute, she has a conversation with her AI about the product roadmap. It’s already analyzed user feedback, competitive moves, and technical constraints. It asks clarifying questions. By the time she arrives, there’s a draft strategy doc waiting. She spends 20 minutes refining the thinking that matters. The AI spent three hours on everything else.

In her investor meeting, she’s completely present. No laptop. No notes. The AI is listening, will remember everything, and will connect this conversation to relevant context from 40 other conversations she’s had this month. Afterward, it updates her CRM, sends follow-ups, and adjusts her fundraising strategy based on the signals it detected.

The technology is invisible. But her company is moving faster than would have been possible five years ago. She’s making better decisions because she has more mental space. She’s less stressed because she’s not drowning in notifications. She’s more present in every conversation because she’s not trying to remember everything.

The complexity of building a company hasn’t decreased. If anything, it’s increased—she’s attempting something more ambitious than she could have before. But the attention tax has collapsed. 

That’s the world we’re building toward. That’s more information than ever, more possibility than ever, with an ever decreasing psychological footprint. And even though technology has taken up a larger footprint in the company than ever before, every other interaction with other colleagues, partners and tools is actually more human. 

“There is more information at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system,” Weiser wrote in Scientific American in 1991. “Yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.” 

Technology has always moved toward invisibility. AI completes the pattern. It makes technology invisible experientially. 

The power is there. The capability is extraordinary. And for the right founder, it’s all there for the taking.