There's this quote attributed to Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." It gets trotted out in pitch decks and product meetings to justify ignoring users. Visionaries don't make faster horses. They make cars.
But hold on. What would it actually take to make a faster horse?
You'd need to understand how muscle fibers convert ATP into mechanical force. How tendons store and release elastic energy. How the cardiovascular system delivers oxygen at peak output. How bones bear load without shattering. How a brain coordinates four limbs at forty miles per hour while predicting terrain.
You'd need to reverse-engineer a billion years of R&D, then improve on it.
Making a faster horse isn't a failure of imagination. It might be the hardest engineering problem you could pick.
We've gotten very good at moving electrons around. We can mass-produce semiconductors at nanometer precision, write software that runs on billions of devices, build neural networks that dream in language. These are genuine miracles. But atoms are harder than bits, and cells are harder than atoms.
Biology remains mostly illegible to us. We observe it, catalog it, occasionally nudge it. But we don't yet engineer it in the way we engineer bridges or circuits.
There's a version of the generational lament that goes: we were born too late to map the seas and too early to visit the stars.
Make a faster horse.