Waste to Wonder - What DIY Vape Batteries Teach Us about AI and Human Imagination

Last week I read a story based on the headline. I admit it was crazy clickbait and I fell for it after mindlessly scrolling. "A guy collects 500 discarded vape batteries and builds a massive power bank that runs his whole house."

But after reading it, joy bubbled up in me and I knew I had to share it even wider.

It definitely was in line with my GenX mousetrap car tinkering mentality but that wasn't exactly why I got excited (though, respect). It definitely possessed the audacity we need right now by using trash tech to power a home. But the biggest draw for me goes directly to something that I keep saying here over and over:

Human creativity comes from outside the patterned space and AI can help us find the unexpected.

Prompt: Futuristic Beautiful African American Woman Inventor

The future will belong to the people, communities and systems who know how to see possibility where others see waste.

The batteries inside disposable vapes aren’t designed for a second life. They’re supposed to be used, tossed, and forgotten. That’s the story of most consumer tech. It has only one pathway, only one purpose. That was the pattern. But when paired with the human imagination, suddenly, these “single-use” objects became nodes in a much bigger system — a literal power source.

This is edge innovation. These big ideas don’t come from boardrooms or labs. They come from garages, street corners, maker spaces, repurposed tech, and communities that have long practiced resourcefulness out of necessity.

It’s a kind of creativity that says let's work with what we have and see what we can do. The solution is already here, we just haven't looked at the problem with the right eyes.

AI doesn’t do this. It sees patterns at a scale, speed, and layering that humans can’t.

And that matters. Because when humans know what the patterns have been we can immediately begin to imagine what may have been overlooked. The imagination suddenly has new landscapes to walk through. AI points to the doorway; imagination decides to walk through it. AI doesn’t create the dream; it expands the field of what we consider dreamable.

A lot of the rhetoric these days focuses on “AI replacing creativity.” That’s a boring story, and frankly, an inaccurate one. The more interesting story to me is AI catalyzing possibilities we wouldn’t have thought to explore, surfacing patterns we didn’t know were there, pulling us toward the edges where new ideas live.

The vape-battery-power-house guy didn’t build an AI collaborator to do his project. But imagine the future maker who has:

• An AI that identifies overlooked energy sources in waste streams

• An AI that maps the potential of discarded consumer electronics

• An AI that models repurposing pathways invisible to traditional engineering

• An AI that connects local problems with unconventional global solutions

These are exactly the sort of pattern-to-possibility pipeline AI is good at.

I’m always talking about human purpose in the age of AI and how we must de-center the myth of the human as machine to unlock what makes us truly unique.

Stories like these remind us that our purpose isn’t to compete with AI. Our purpose is to imagine beyond the patterns AI reveals. AI can surface connections and patterns. But humans are positioned to ask, What could this become?

Repurposing vape batteries is a metaphor for this wild future. The future that belongs to those who can remix. Those who can look at leftovers and see architectures and those who understand that creativity is re-seeing what already exists.

When humans and AI collaborate well, it's more aligned with what’s possible.

Here’s my invitation this week:

Look at your world, your home, your work, your relationships, your assumptions through the eyes of that maker cracking open a vape and ask yourself:

What am I calling waste that might actually be power? What stories have I told myself about the “single use” parts of my life? What dreams are waiting in the edges? What patterns might AI help me see so that I can see differently?

We don’t need more efficiency. We need more imagination. We need more people willing to wonder.

The future won’t be built by those clinging to the center. It will be built by those tending to the edges who know that creativity doesn’t always look like innovation. Sometimes, it looks like 500 discarded batteries quietly rearranged into a new world.