I got a notification from a helpful app today that made me chuckle. It was a reminder that daylight saving time had begun, with instructions to “set your vehicle’s clock forward.” Manually. In 2025.
In an era where we’re breathlessly discussing AI replacing software engineers and revolutionizing industries, I’m still getting reminders to physically press buttons on my dashboard to adjust the time—a problem solved in a different era of technology.
This small moment reveals something important about our technological future that often gets overlooked in grand AI narratives: progress is frequently bottlenecked not by technical limitations, but by very human factors.
My car’s clock doesn’t need some fancy new technology. The capability for handling DST has existed for decades. What’s missing is the organizational will to implement it across legacy systems, the economic incentive to update perfectly functional older models, and perhaps the recognition that this small inconvenience matters enough to fix.
I believe our future will be full of these strange juxtapositions—cutting-edge AI existing alongside surprisingly persistent legacy systems. Not because we can’t technically solve these problems, but because human systems, priorities, and institutional inertia often move at a much slower pace than technological capability. [^1]
So while some types of work may transform rapidly under the influence of AI, much of our world will likely remain stubbornly anchored to older systems—bottlenecked by human factors rather than technical ones. The future may belong to AGI, but it will still probably require us to occasionally reach over and manually adjust our dashboard clocks.
[^1]: This, I’ve learned, is a common view held by economists.