Join Our CommunityBetween deification and doomism, the polarisation around AI is about as extreme as it can get. The question seems limited to whether it will save or end humanity. We choose to occupy the gap between these two entrenched positions to ask a different question: what do we risk losing, and what can we do to preserve what matters?
In March 2016, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol at the game of Go2. Twenty years after Deep Blue, computational power had increased a thousandfold, yet AlphaGo explored millions of times fewer positions per move3. It marked a symbolic turning point: brute force no longer prevailed; the computer's edge over humans was no longer limited to computational power. AlphaGo's deep neural networks had learned intuition, rivalling that of the world's best human player3. It was the seed of the revolution we are living through.
The promises of this technology and its recent successors seem endless: productivity will skyrocket, labour will become a hobby, it will solve everything from climate change to the energy crisis, the Singularity is near4, 5... The AI revolution: an era of spontaneous, effortless progress and prosperity. Such exciting times to be alive! Yet, birth-rates dwindle6, mass layoffs sweep across sectors7, 8, talented people who are lucky enough to land a good job struggle to buy a home9, and more people take their own lives each year10. As machines become more capable, humans' place in society shrinks. Are we being ungrateful, or is it the dip before the Promethean tide, the last stretch before Utopia?
Precedents
The Industrial Revolution, when technological progress enabled the transfer of skill and strength from humans to machines, presented a similar dissonance. Mechanisation would set humankind free from labour13, inventions would “subdue our needs and miseries”11, and we would live in “equality of abundance”12 ever after. But the new powerful machines belonged to someone, and hundreds of thousands of skilled craftspeople lost their jobs, workers' wages were halved, then reduced to a fifth14. In 1848, 30,000 homeless, abandoned children lived on the streets of London15, one in four babies died in their first year16, and typhus and cholera devastated the overcrowded cities17.
In this gap, William Morris stands out for his thoughtful radicalism. He was not anti-machine, but pro-human. While acknowledging the material comfort industrialisation brought, he criticised the way it was implemented. For him, Art is a fundamental human right18, and the delegation of skilled, meaningful work to machines robbed the world of artistry and workers of enjoyable labour20. Art became a luxury, and beauty a commodity only the rich could afford19. He was appalled that the alienating labour of factory workers was in large part used to manufacture short-lived, futile knick-knacks, bound to bring very little joy to their buyers19. A Victorian gentleman's version of “We work jobs we hate, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like.”
Legacy
We claim William Morris's heritage here. Like him, we don't oppose the tools, but refuse to ignore how their commercial implementation transforms society. Where he fought to preserve the dignity of craft and the place of art and beauty in everyone's life, what is at stake today is human creative labour and capacity to think independently. And inspired by Morris's Firm and workshops, we also believe in small scale practical initiatives, in addition to advocacy and education.
If the AI revolution follows the same pattern as the Industrial one (a sudden leap in what can be delegated to machines), it differs in substance. At the end of the 19th century, only a privileged few could obtain the finances for the expensive machines needed to run a modern factory21, but today, developing a frontier model is several orders of magnitude more expensive, and only a handful of corporations across the world have the means to do so22, 23.
Another notable difference is that the mechanisation created a demand for educated workers, disciplined and literate, able to comply with the factory's regulation and norm. The need for clerks, foremen, and engineers drove the rise in popular education24, 25. The delegation of intellectual and creative labour to AIs erodes this need.
The new AI tech is already everywhere: from phone keyboards to content recommendation, from search engines to virtual assistants, most of us encounter it daily. Many use the free mainstream AI chatbots to write emails or work documents. ChatGPT alone boasts 200 million daily users26. And why not? These tools are very compelling: modern, powerful, and of course free for basic use. The operating cost of ChatGPT can be conservatively estimated at tens of million dollars per day27, 28, 29, but at the age of the internet, we are familiar with this deception: “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer; you are the product being sold”.
These billions invested in offering free access to anyone with an internet connection have a very immediate impact on creative workers. Artists, illustrators, designers, and others see AI systems, trained on their work without consent or compensation, generate content that undercuts their rates30. Regardless of the output's quality, to some clients, free and immediate makes it “good enough”. In William Morris's time, machines took art away from craftspeople. Today, art is taken away from artists.
Consequences
In his Tractatus Politicus, Spinoza distinguishes between the power we command (potestas) and the power we cultivate within ourselves, our ability (potentia)31. In his philosophy, relying on the first makes us dependent, while cultivating the second makes us free. The writer Alain Damasio reminds us that this idea is strikingly embodied with modern technology32, 33: we have the world's knowledge at our fingertips, but how many poems do we know by heart? We can fly to the other end of the world, but how far can we walk in a day? With modern convenience, we command tremendous power, but how much of these technologies we have come to depend on can we fix ourselves34? What remains of us without our technological shell?
This is neither specific to AI nor new. Building tools is humanity's greatest triumph, after all. But there is a crucial distinction when this technology is used to delegate intellectual effort: we are rewarded with instant answers, and spared the exercise of thinking. A lathe is called the king of machine tools because it enables the fabrication of other, more complex tools35. The delegation of intellectual effort inverts this principle: the more we rely on it, the less our ability to imagine and innovate. If it is in our nature to invent and create, this is where we forfeit it46.
Much of the work once done by entry-level employees is already getting delegated to AIs36, 37. This produces a gap in professional development: as fewer people gain experience, it becomes harder to fill intermediate roles, and the increasingly capable AI systems step in to fill them. Students cannot be expected to take a senior position straight out of school, and the competence gap can only widen from there.
Simultaneously, some AI models aim to achieve superhuman performances. Where they succeed, we are bestowed with an inconceivable artefact that we cannot improve upon38, 39. We are given the fish, but remain stranded on the shore, unable to reach the waters it came from, let alone learn how to catch it. And that is the goal here, what we want to achieve: solutions even better than what we could ever come up with. Success. But a success that makes human ingenuity obsolete.
Futures
How does this impact our societies? It feels like any misstep at this long-fantasised crossroads leads to a different dystopian future. As we lose touch with the technology we use, we run the risk of the Adeptus Mechanicus40: a society worshipping machines that have become magic41 and are activated through learned rituals. Or dulling our brains by outsourcing cognition and creativity, we could tumble towards Idiocracy42, where thinking is a hobby, and in the same way only today's athletes match our ancestors' average physical capacity43, only a few specialists in future society would reach our current average intellectual ability.
Supposing we dodge these pitfalls, we still have to figure out what to do with ourselves in a world where our contributions in strength, skill, creativity, and intelligence are subpar, more expensive and less performant than those of machines. Would we willingly accept our fate as human batteries of The Matrix44, or more likely drift into the comfortable soma-induced hollowness of Brave New World45? Finding a more constructive path forward would require fundamental changes to our societal and political structures.
Choice
So, what do we do, now? The problem we see is not with Neural Networks, LLMs or AIs in general, but with specific usages of these tools. Usages that replace human creativity, usages that atrophy intelligence, usages that alienate people. We choose differently: neither worshipping nor rejecting the tools, but caring for humans and their capacity to invent, create, and learn. In a world that promises to remove every difficulty and invites us to surrender to blissful idleness, we choose the arduous path of continuous study.
Anyone can make this choice for themselves. There's no need for a membership card to the Homo Optans Sapiens club. It's only a matter of thinking about the opportunity to grow before delegating, of carefully considering the human loss as well as the benefit. It might take a fair amount of courage in the years to come, though.
We believe there is potential in collaborative small-scale action, and offer to build a community1, a “guild” of cognitive craftspeople who share practices, support each other, and exchange brain-grown ideas. Join us to discuss practical applications, participate in developing a better understanding of the ongoing revolution, receive or offer support, and find solutions together.
Tools are neither good nor bad, but our use of them can be. Let us preserve our agency of thought. Cognition is more than a commodity: it is our essence.
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