The Faster the Future Arrives, the More We Reach for the Past

What becomes valuable when everything is instant?

By Louize Clark

Picture a high street a few days before Christmas in the late eighties.

It's busy in the way high streets used to be busy, everyone finishing their list, that last-minute rush because the shops shut for two days and that's genuinely it. A queue at the butcher's. Another at the post office. Somebody stood outside a shop waiting for a relative who said "about ten minutes" and could, by now, be anywhere at all.

Nobody is checking where anybody is.

There's no I'm outside. No family WhatsApp confirming who's bringing what. No live location, no scroll of photos showing what everyone's been doing for six months. You're excited to see people precisely because you haven't seen them in months. Cousins arrive and, despite barely speaking since the last family gathering, are inseparable within the hour. There's news to catch up on. Stories nobody's heard. People look different, because things have actually happened to them since you last looked.

There's anticipation, because there are still things you don't know.

It isn't only Christmas finding its way back into people's feeds. It's BMXs in the rain. Saturday mornings in front of a box television. Cassette tapes, arcades, the plastic toy buried in a cereal box that cost pennies to make and somehow felt like a prize worth digging for. None of it was extraordinary at the time. That might be exactly why it's what people are reaching for now.

I want to be fair to nostalgia before I go any further, because it edits generously. Nobody's genuinely pining for a three-week wait for a parcel, or a ruined roll of film. The past wasn't better simply because it moved more slowly.

And yet a lot of what's circulating right now, those old high streets and childhood living rooms, has actually been generated by AI. Which is a strange thing to sit with: using some of the most advanced technology we've ever built to reconstruct a version of the world that existed before it.

At the same time, that technology keeps accelerating. OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra last week, another jump in what a system can do across research, coding and serious professional work. Less than four years after ChatGPT first appeared, we've gone from being impressed a chatbot could write a decent paragraph to watching systems operate inside the same digital environments we do. One of those trends is racing toward what's next. The other is reaching for what we've already left behind. On the face of it, they shouldn't be happening at the same time.

But I don't think people are actually missing 1987. I think they're missing what 1987 happened to contain, anticipation, unavailability, the gaps where nothing in particular was happening. You could be somewhere without simultaneously being somewhere else too. You waited for the next Smash Hits to get the lyrics to the song you loved. You waited for the postcard confirming your neighbour had landed safely. Even the toy in the cereal box was exciting partly because you didn't know which one you'd get.

Things arrived. That was the whole experience.

We treat most of that as inconvenience now, because technology found a faster way, and mostly the faster way genuinely is better. But faster doesn't mean everything that used to live around the slower version was worthless.

Stand in a queue for a cup of tea thirty years ago and there was nothing to do but stand there, look around, notice people, maybe end up talking to whoever was next to you about nothing at all. It wasn't some meaningful moment. It was smaller than that. It was just what happened when two people were stuck in the same place with nowhere else to be.

Stand in the same queue now and there's somewhere else to be immediately, the phone comes out. Those two minutes haven't just become more productive. They've quietly stopped containing what they used to.

The pandemic accelerated this more than I think we've properly reckoned with. In a few weeks, people who'd lived much of their lives outside the digital world had no choice but to move inside it work, banking, family contact, all of it through a screen. A lot of good came from that. It also meant the digital world stopped being somewhere we visited and became somewhere we live, and we adjusted to that one ordinary day at a time, without ever quite clocking the size of the shift.

Generative AI arrived into exactly that population already living through screens, already fatigued and offered to remove another layer of effort. That's genuinely exciting. Somebody can have an idea today and reach for capability that, two years ago, would have needed a specialist, real money, or a skill they simply didn't have.

Which is what makes the nostalgia more interesting, not less. Because it raises a question worth sitting with: was all the friction we've spent decades removing actually the same kind of friction? A queue at the till and a conversation with a neighbour were, technically, both friction. One was worth engineering away. I'm not convinced the other was we just never separated the two, because until now we never had to.

That won't only be true of high streets and tea queues. It'll be true inside businesses too, as the technology gets good enough to remove a human step entirely rather than just speed it up. A patient may be glad an AI reviewed years of their history in seconds, and still want a doctor with time to explain the result. A customer might be perfectly happy with automated service nine times out of ten, and on the tenth simply want somebody to say, "I understand." The organisations that do well out of this next stretch won't necessarily be the ones that automate the most. They'll be the ones that work out, before it happens by default, which parts of the friction were actually the relationship.

There's a promise attached to all of this, that AI hands people their time back. Often, it genuinely does. But it hands the time back without telling you what it's for. An afternoon's work finishes in twenty minutes, and the rest of the afternoon gets filled with messages instead. We can get faster without getting any more present. That's the sharper version of the productivity question, really not how much time AI has freed up, but what we actually did with it once we had it.

We now have more powerful tools for turning an idea into something real than any generation before us. At exactly the same time, we've built an environment that's exceptionally good at occupying the space where an idea is supposed to begin. There used to be a lot more nothing on a train, while the kettle boiled, on a wet Sunday with nothing on. Now almost every pause comes with an invitation to look at something instead.

Maybe that's why a few things we currently think of as slightly old-fashioned are starting to feel like the premium option — someone who answers the phone, a doctor with time to listen, a shop where somebody remembers your name.

I don't think anyone actually wants 1987 back, film development and all. I think we're starting to notice what left quietly, one convenience at a time, while we were busy making everything faster.

The technology arriving now is incredible, and there's an enormous amount worth building with it. But the more capable it gets, the more deliberate we're going to have to be about what, exactly, we ask it to replace.

Because before long, the interesting question won't be what AI can do.

It'll be what becomes more valuable the moment it can.

*AI Policies UK helps organisations see the AI infrastructure they're already standing on, chosen, inherited and embedded — before decisions like this one have to be made under pressure. Get in touch: *louize@aipolicies.uk