On Imagination as bottleneck

by Eve Bouffard, Head of Design at Y Combinator · September 2026

how can we ensure the bounds of human imagination recede as rapidly as the bounds of machine intelligence?

historically, human imagination has run far ahead of the tools available to us. we could imagine worlds and inventions we had no means to create.

the gap is narrowing, for the better. the distance between imagining something and making it real is shrinking.

the question, then, is how can we expand our collective imagination?

New forms of education? art? new philosophies? new institutions? new religions?

how do we push the upper bound on what people dare to imagine?

if we can solve this, it could be one of the greatest propellants of human progress in history.