The Tools We Build, Build Us Back (my TEDx talk)

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I had been living this talk for thirty years. On 28 August 2026, at TEDx Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai, I finally gave it.

The title, which I can now share: The Tools We Build, Build Us Back.

It goes back further than Easytools, further even than the publishing house. It goes back to a chimpanzee Ms Jane Goodall watched in Tanzania in 1960, stripping a twig to fish termites out of a mound. And further still, to a shaped stone found at Lomekwi in Kenya, 3.3 million years old, older than our own species. Every tool since then, I argued, had exactly one thing in common. It waited. A hammer waits for a hand. A book waits for a pair of eyes. Even the software I built for a living waited for a customer to click.

Somewhere around 2023, that stopped being true.

I talked about building a Tamil text editor last year without writing a single line of code myself; for the first time in thirty years, I hadn’t typed the logic out by hand. I talked about asking an AI to help polish this very talk, and watching it quietly delete the one story I actually cared about keeping, the LIFCO one, my grandfather’s dictionaries and my father’s fifty years of unquestioned refunds. The AI’s version read better without that story. It was also no longer mine.

Seven attempts to clear first-year maths in college came up too, because a hall full of engineering students deserves to know that the man on stage once needed seven tries at a subject most of them will clear in one.

Eighteen minutes, one stage in Madurai, a debt thirty years in the making. The full talk is on YouTube. Would love to know what you think.

References:

1. A simple branch becomes a fishing rod in the hands of these resourceful chimpanzees.