The Internet’s Aperture Is Shrinking - predictions - Future Commerce

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Episode notes

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.