The Internet’s Aperture Is Shrinking

Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations and the thirty-fifth member of the MIT Media Lab Consortium, joins Phillip and Brian to interrogate what really happens when enterprises leap from "zero to one" to "one to a hundred" with AI. The conversation moves from the productivity paradox (studies showing AI can add 20% to completion time even as users swear it saves them work) to the human hand-off in commerce, the limits of agentic shopping, and the shrinking aperture of the internet. The big takeaway is that 2026 is the year of assessment, not aspiration.

Paleolithic Brains; Medieval Infrastructure; Godlike Technology

Key Takeaways

• AI has created a productivity paradox. Although it may feel like a magical solution that unlocks productivity and throughput, it often lengthens time to completion. 
• Cognitive atrophy is real and happening faster than we realize. 
• Net-new ideas still need human intuition. AI learns from and mimics existing experiences and content. 
• The human-AI handoff should be designed for where the agent stops and identity begins, mapped across three tiers: low-emotion, middle-emotion, and high-emotion products and content.
• Fix your site for LLM crawlers now. Agentic checkout can wait.

Key Quotes

[00:06:30] "We did not have a digital information superhighway… that was zero to one. And now we are in that one to 100 moment… we snap our fingers, and we're at parity with all these capabilities." — Matt Maher

[00:17:30] "It objectively takes more time. Our dopamine receptors are feeling good when we're that productive. So we'll happily take 20% more time and claim we didn't." — Matt Maher

[00:23:30] "AI could literally never have created [the elevator screen] because it did not exist in the world before. It is a reduction to the mean." — Matt Maher

[00:51:30] "The aperture of the internet continues to shrink, and everything becomes more personalized for each of us. If you are not in that aperture of what people see, you don't exist anymore." — Matt Maher

In-Show Mentions

• M7 Innovations
• The METR study (late 2025) on AI developer time savings
• E.O. Wilson’s The Origins of Creativity
• Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings
• Amazon v. Perplexity lawsuit

Associated Links

• What AI and Watchmaking Have in Common
• The Death of Slop and the End of Time
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• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

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