As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'

Automation Demands More From Us

We usually think of automation as the opposite of doing things ourselves—machines take over, we sit back, and life gets easier. But McLuhan spotted something counterintuitive that's now obvious if you look around: as technology gets more powerful, it actually pushes more responsibility back onto us, just in different ways.

Consider what happened with smartphones. They automated away the need for cameras, GPS devices, flashlights, and calculators. Yet we now spend hours learning photo editing, troubleshooting our devices, customizing our homes, and building our own online presence. We've become our own tech support, our own content creators, our own broadcasters. The automation didn't eliminate work—it democratized it, moving it from specialized technicians into our hands. Even something like meal kit delivery feels like a step toward DIY cooking rather than away from it.

The real insight is that each wave of automation doesn't create leisure so much as it shifts what counts as "normal work." It offloads the routine stuff but opens up new terrain for us to master. That's actually liberating if you want it to be—but only if you recognize the trade-off. The age of doing it yourself isn't coming; it's already here, just wearing a different disguise.