Viewpoint: The Paradox of Infinite Capability

by Cameron McAnsh

As AI makes it easier to build almost anything, a different problem starts to surface. This piece explores why – when the tools are no longer the constraint – deciding what to work on can feel harder than ever. Drawing on personal experience, Cameron McAnsh reflects on abundance, indecision, and what gets lost when choice stops being scarce

Katie O’Connor, Editor, ASC Viewpoints.

When I was a child, I would regularly announce to my parents that I was bored. They had answers ready. Books. Drawing. Ride my bike. Puzzles. Nintendo. Go to a friend’s house. Play with my siblings. The list was endless. And yet, faced with an almost unlimited number of options before me, I would mooch around the house unable or unwilling to commit to any of them.

Fast forward some ten or so years, and I found history to be repeating itself.

In the early 2000s we all started commuting along the Information Superhighway. With Google as our navigator, virtually every book, every newspaper, and every answer was within reach. And again, the same problem. With unlimited options available, I would sit staring at a sparsely populated Google search page not knowing what to do, what to search for. I usually ended up building yet another crime-ridden metropolis courtesy of SimCity.

And now twenty-five years later, the current AI age has history repeating itself once again.

Over the past year, Claude has helped me to unlock items on my to-do list that have sat untouched for more time than I care to admit. Tasks I had quietly accepted I would never get around to, because I lacked the knowledge, the time, or the confidence to start, are getting done. The to-do list isn’t complete; it never will be. But the knowledge barrier, which I had accepted as a permanent ceiling, turns out to have been a temporary wall.

And so, for the third time in my life, I find myself staring at the endless possibilities before me, unable to decide what I’m going to do next.

As Google bridged the knowledge gap, AI has smashed the capability gap. Tools like Claude, and newer open-source agents such as OpenClaw (a personal AI assistant that runs on your own machine, connects to your calendar and inbox, and acts as a 24/7 digital colleague) mean the barrier between your ideas, execution and actual delivery has never been lower. I can now build things I could not build before. I can write, research, design, and ship at a pace that would have seemed not just unrealistic two years ago, but just plain impossible.

So, with endless knowledge and virtually unlimited capability at my fingertips, why am I sitting here unable to decide, or seemingly unable to imagine, what I should build next?

For IT and business leaders, we have spent years telling our organisations that the constraint was capability: if only we had better tools, faster systems, smarter automation. Now those things are arriving, and a different constraint is emerging. What problem are we actually trying to solve? What does good look like when the execution barrier is removed?

Google exposed that many of us did not know what we wanted to learn and now AI is exposing that even when we can, many of us do not know what we want to create, build or change.

My parents could not solve my childhood boredom by adding more options to the list. They tried. More options was never the problem. The bottleneck was always me. It appears that, in order to be successful, to build the next ‘killer app’, to unlock unheard of productivity, I first will have to address the biggest problem of all – me!

Unhelpfully, it seems SimCity can now be played via a web browser.

Cameron McAnsh is a technology professional with more than 20 years experience in building new and transforming legacy technology platforms and tools. He may be contacted at cameron@technologysolutionsnetwork.io