This is going to change art forever!

I want to say it’s print on demand. It looks like freedom for artists. No stock, no warehouses, no gatekeepers. Just upload your work and suddenly you’re a business. Except it’s still a gate. Same system, new costume, worse terms, thinner margins. You might make twenty cents on a blanket, even if the art on it actually matters, like my Yangtze finless porpoise print reminding you that artists are becoming endangered too, trying to survive in a river of corporate sludge while being told this is opportunity. So no, that’s not the most important invention of my lifetime. It’s just capitalism wearing a nicer mask.

The most impactful invention isn’t even fully here yet. It’s AI. And sure, I could spiral into the doom narrative about machines stealing our jobs and humans becoming obsolete, but let’s run a different thought experiment. What if this thing actually does something good. Not “good for shareholders” good, but good for humans, animals, ecosystems, and especially artists, who are usually the first ones crushed by broken systems.

The most important invention in your lifetime is…

Right now, being an artist isn’t about making art. It’s about surviving the system around it. The admin, the marketing, the algorithms, the chasing, the exhaustion. Imagine AI quietly dismantling all of that. Not replacing your voice, but clearing the rubble around it. You make the work. It handles the logistics, contracts, distribution, rights, and boring soul-draining nonsense. You bring the lightning. It builds the infrastructure without claiming ownership of the storm.

And then artists stop being poor. Not famous, not viral, not temporarily lucky, but actually wealthy in the ways that matter. Time-rich. Energy-rich. Health-rich. Meaning-rich and that dirty one, filthy rich. Because money buys time for artists to spend more time on their art. So let’s not shy away from that one. Not because they sold out, but because the system stopped selling them out. The right people find your work automatically. Royalties actually work. Your art moves through the world and you move with it, financially and ethically. Permanently.

Your art stops being decoration and starts being infrastructure. My porpoise blanket doesn’t just sit on a couch, it funds protection, education, regeneration. Art stops being something we hang on walls and starts being something that holds up reality. Artists stop decorating the world and start designing it. Culture leads. Systems follow. Always.

Purpose comes back, not through productivity but through creation, connection, care, and stewardship. Artists become the nervous system of society. Feeling first. Thinking second. Building third. Not scrambling. Not begging. Thriving.

So what’s the most important invention of my lifetime? Not print on demand. Not smartphones. Not social media. Not even AI itself. It’s the possibility that artists no longer have to survive inside systems designed to erase them. That creativity stops being decoration at the end of capitalism and becomes the blueprint for what replaces it. And if AI becomes the tool that makes that possible, then it won’t just change how we work. It will change how we live.

There we are… was that positive enough?