Long before computers, humans were looking for ways to make something else do the work. Call it laziness, efficiency or ingenuity. We have always had a complicated relationship with effort.
Our brains kept finding ways around it.
Water clocks were measuring time in the ancient world. In the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria described a coin-operated device that dispensed holy water. Automation—and finding a way to charge for it—has quite a history. The history of Hero’s dispenser
Money wasn’t the only reason people invented things, of course. Curiosity, necessity and ambition played their parts. But once an invention proved useful, someone usually started looking for a business model.
Some habits survive remarkably well.
Today, AI is being presented as the holy grail of automation. Ask a question, get an answer. Describe an idea, receive a design. Request some code, watch it appear.
But where did the knowledge behind those answers come from?
What if we had never written down our discoveries? What if each generation had carried its knowledge through a lifetime and then taken it to the grave?
Progress depends on what we leave behind: observations, arguments, experiments, mistakes, music, mathematics and art. Someone has to discover something. Someone has to record it. Someone else has to question it and take it further.
In 2023, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku described AI chatbots as “glorified tape recorders.” I wouldn’t use that phrase as a complete explanation of how these systems work. But it raises a question I keep returning to: how much of what impresses us comes from the machine, and how much comes from the human work behind it? Kaku’s remarks
Think of the mathematics associated with Pythagoras, the discoveries of Archimedes, Mozart’s Requiem or the paintings that changed how people saw the world. These came from people observing, experimenting, feeling and making choices.
“Artificial” is a reasonable word for a system we have built. What bothers me is how easily it lets us overlook the very human inheritance that helped make that system possible.
And now we can put that inheritance to work at extraordinary speed.
I build software for a living. I use AI, and I see its value every day. It can shorten the distance between an idea and something we can test. It can take repetitive work off our hands and give experienced people more room to think.
That last part matters: more room to think.
Because the temptation is to stop.
We have built a remarkably efficient deep fryer for information. Feed something in, turn up the heat and receive another batch of polished output. Used carelessly, it starts to look suspiciously like a brain fryer.
This is where I worry about the little prefix “RE.”
Recreate. Rewrite. Repackage. Reinvent.
None of these activities is inherently bad. Human creativity has always borrowed, combined and transformed what came before. Originality doesn’t require working in a vacuum.
But there is a difference between using existing material to express a considered idea and accepting a plausible result because it arrived quickly.
When we stop making that distinction, we risk filling the world with a grey stew of things that look finished but have very little to say. Another article. Another product. Another image. Recognisable ingredients, endlessly rearranged.
More output doesn’t automatically mean more insight.
Which brings me back to mediocrity.
If almost anyone can produce something that looks competent, competent presentation becomes a weaker signal of ability. The polished surface tells us less. We have to look harder at the thought underneath it.
Was the problem understood? Was there an observation worth sharing? Did someone make a difficult choice—or simply accept the first convincing answer?
And yet, this is a positive letter to the public.
Perhaps we are finally getting rid of mediocrity’s ability to pass itself off as something exceptional. When anyone with a pocket device can produce polished work, polish alone won’t impress us for very long.
Those willing to leave the thinking to a machine can keep stirring the same grey stew of RE-created everything. My hope is that people with the urge to question, imagine and create will stand out more clearly against it.
That’s what excites me. I use these tools. I want them to improve. But I still want to bring something of my own to the table—and I want to recognise something of the person behind the work I read, see and use.
So yes, I can’t wait for the next, improved model. Let it speed up the cooking.
I’m looking forward to seeing who still has something of their own to serve.