If fire made us human, what does AI make us?
Been trying to work up to the right analogy....
Still can’t decide if AI is more like fire or electricity. That’s a lie. I’ve decided. It’s fire. Fire wins over electricity because it required no new infrastructure for the end user. No re-wiring of houses or installations of switches; fire was just there. Just like AI. No end user had to buy a new computer or figure out how to use this new-fangled thingee called a PC. AI was just there. But why fire?
There’s this very good book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham is an “English anthropologist and is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and his research group is now part of the newly established Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He is a MacArthur fellow. He is co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, the long-term study of the Kanyawara chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. His research culminates in the study of human evolution in which he draws conclusions based on the behavioural ecology of apes. As a graduate student, Wrangham studied under Robert Hinde and Jane Goodall.” Typical underachiever right?
In Catching Fire, Wrangham makes the argument that the ability to cook meat over a fire was the predicate for us truly becoming human (in a Homo Sapiens sense). Regardless of if you accept his timeline for this, cooked food allowed humans to shrink their guts and thus dedicate more energy to say larger brains, it allowed for greater consumption of calories which leads to many things including the idea that early human who mastered fire for cooking food, were able to grow larger and reproduce more than others - they were successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Other work on the control of fire by humans outlines how it provided us with new means of not just cooking but protecting ourselves and even shifting us away, for the very first time, from utter dependence on the sun for both warmth and light. So how does AI fit in?
AI’s impact will be similar to fire in that it will free up time and energy that we spend on other things and will present us with the challenge of what to do with that additional Spielraum. Now fire, and electricity are similar in that they both created wholly new activities and enabled a range of new uses but I keep coming back to AI and fire because electricity could, in many ways, be seen as an extension or an expansion of things we’d already learned to do. AI starts off that way. Make no mistake, AI is coming for your To Do list. That sounds great at first but then individuals, teams, orgs, all need to be thinking about what happens to that newly released extra room/time. I think it is into this room, this space, this Spielraum, that AI has a real chance to change us. Not so much at the genetic level like fire did but certainly at levels all the way from the individual to the societal.
I wrote earlier about what it might look like if no one ever left your company, meaning what would happen if our ability to retain and access institutional knowledge increased to 100%. That’s thinking small though. What happens when AI creates the space and capability for everyone in society to access the very best lawyers, doctors, mechanics, essentially when everyone in the world can access an incredibly smart, on demand, concierge that can help you navigate everything from where to eat, to where to work, to where to get help if you ever get laid off. Those possibilities are what make the case, in my mind, that AI has the potential to be as impactful as fire. Clearly, fire was owned by no one and literally anyone could start a fire if they knew how. There weren’t huge data centers involved that required huge amounts of electricity. To be clear, I’m focused on the end use experience. To us, AI just appeared. A spark that has become a wildfire. The question is, do we harness fire into a useful tool or do we fail that and it burns forests - the more likely outcome is that it will be both - but that potential is huge.
Additional readings:
Control of fire by early humans.
Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid.