One of the things I love about the span of time is stuff like the timeline of tool usage by humans. Homo Sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago, but there’s evidence of hominid tool usage dating back over 2 million years ago.

That, it seems fair to say, is a long time.

It’s also fair to say that we Homo Sapiens know how to master our tools. We literally evolved alongside them, and have never known a tool-free world, as a species.

Which makes it so surprising to me that we still seem so skeptical of new tools when they come along. The synthesiser was seen as the death of music, because why would anyone want to learn the cello when you can just press a key to make the perfect sound every time? The keyboard was seen as the death of handwriting, since why bother learning how to write? The calculator the death of arithmetic, the camera the death of painting, the bicycle the death of walking.

Even writing (writing!) was seen by some ancient Greek thinkers as the death of memory.

And yet the human capacity for integrating new tools into our (literal) toolbox remains undefeated. Rather than tools limiting human creativity and capability, in every single instance the tools have always been additive. The trick is to avoid seeing the tool in terms of what it replaces, but rather in what it enables. Photography enables the capture of fidelity in a way that created a brand new branch of art using the camera, while also freeing painting from the need for realism. Electronic instruments allowed for new, previously impossible speeds and accuracy, while also freeing traditional musicians to be able to explore new areas of creativity inspired by their digital bandmates.

And yes, this is another post about AI. A reaction, this time, to the idea that the goal of AI is to somehow make everything effortless, and that by seeking to abolish effort, we somehow risk losing something essential about ourselves.

The idea goes that the hard work is the thing that makes the work itself capable of greatness. Remove the hard work, and the result will be bland. Unearned. Unoriginal. It will miss that human something. Further, our grit and our determination will atrophy, and we will find ourselves unable to create any more, subject only to the slop that AI can produce for us.

I argue that not only does our history with tools suggest this is nonsense, but also that it misses the point. Hard work is not the only signifier of endeavour. As a counter to this, consider the state of flow: that place where we find that we are tackling tasks with ease, effortlessly, our skills and our whims aligned to create what we want.

Is flow effortless? It’s one of the defining characteristics of flow! Is it somehow bland and unearned? I would say not.

The “hard” part here is triggering that state. Flow can often feel like an accident.

But what if AI could be used as a tool to help, to make us “accident prone” as it were? What if AI could be used to coach through the blank page, the fear of failure, the fear of success? What if it could be used to nudge rather than solve, to offer different ways of looking at a problem?

Sure, some will use AI to simply solve the problem — one of the many things we have evolved is a fine sense of calorie efficiency — but the creative ones among us should be able to find ways to use AI to enhance their abilities. Not to tell them new ways of looking at the world, but to prompt them into finding their own new ways of seeing the world.

As with the previous centuries of tools, though, those creatives that learn to harness this new tool may not be the ones who were proficient with the old tools. And that’s a shame, because it’s the same deep curiosity that drives both. The same desire when confronted with a new idea to figure out how to use it to do more of what we love, better, faster, brighter.

And if that tool allows more people to participate? If it can get more people to write, to take photos, to compose, to push past their inhibitions and create? Isn’t that part of the goal of humanity in the first place?

This is why I choose optimism. I choose to hope that we can find a way through this current inflection point, just as we have before, just as we have for our entire existence, and just as our ancestors did for literally millions of years.

Yes, AI is different, but so was everything else. Our history, our pre-history, and the history of our entire species, is one of bending tools to our will.

I choose to believe this fire will be tamed.