I see so much scarcity thinking around AI at the moment.
Fear about what it will take from us.
What it will replace.
The jobs that will disappear.
What happens when machines become capable of doing things that, until very recently, we believed required a human being.
And alongside some very legitimate questions about the risks of AI, there is also an enormous amount of scaremongering.
What I find interesting is how often opinions about AI are formed without people really exploring the technology for themselves — or researching history and considering how we actually got to where we are now as a civilisation.
Sometimes we're repeating someone else's fear rather than doing our own research, experiencing the technology first-hand and critically thinking about what it could actually mean.
I'm not suggesting there aren't risks.
Of course there are.
Every technology capable of creating significant change brings consequences we need to think seriously about.
But I think there is another conversation we need to be having.
Because perhaps we're asking the wrong question.
Something happened this evening
This evening I had an idea.
I wanted to create a way for people to contribute towards pro bono support for someone who genuinely wants to make a change in their life but doesn't currently have the financial resources to access it.
The idea was simple.
People who have the resources to contribute could help fund support for someone who doesn't.
They wouldn't need to know who received it.
They wouldn't need recognition.
They may never know the difference their contribution made.
One human simply helping another.
I called it Pay It Forward.
And then I started talking about the idea with Sol, my AI assistant.
Within one conversation, we had developed the positioning.
Then the website copy.
Then the donation structure.
Then the application page.
Then the application questions.
Then the process behind it.
We even worked through the instructions needed to create the application form on my website.
I then went into ChatGPT Work to continue building the website and discovered something that made me smile.
It had already created the questionnaire.
Think about that for a moment.
Work that, not very long ago, could have involved a copywriter, marketer, web designer and developer — alongside numerous emails, meetings and revisions — had moved from an idea in my head to something tangible in an incredibly short space of time.
And that's when I started thinking about the conversation we're having about AI taking people's jobs.
What happens when creation is no longer scarce?
For most of human history, turning an idea into something real required resources.
Knowledge was scarce.
Technical skills were scarce.
Access to information was scarce.
Production was expensive.
Distribution was difficult.
And therefore the ability to create something had enormous value.
AI changes that equation.
Increasingly, the scarce resource may no longer be:
Can you create this?
Because the answer will increasingly be yes.
And often extraordinarily quickly.
Which means perhaps a different set of questions becomes much more important.
The questions I think we should be asking
What should we create?
Just because something can be built doesn't mean it should be.
Human beings still have to decide what deserves our attention, energy and resources.
Why should it exist?
What is the intention behind what we're creating?
Is it genuinely useful?
Does it solve something?
Does it improve someone's life?
Or are we simply creating because technology has made creation easy?
What problem is actually worth solving?
AI can help us solve problems incredibly quickly.
But identifying the right problem in the first place requires something different.
Observation.
Curiosity.
Experience.
Empathy.
Context.
The ability to look at something and ask, Why are we doing it this way?
What do we believe?
Technology doesn't remove the need for values.
If anything, I think it makes them more important.
When our ability to create, communicate and influence increases dramatically, we need to become clearer about the principles guiding what we do with that capability.
And what are we prepared to take responsibility for?
This may be the biggest question of all.
AI can generate an idea.
It can challenge my thinking.
It can research.
It can write.
It can build.
It can connect things I hadn't connected.
It can turn something that exists inside my head into something tangible in minutes.
But ultimately, I am responsible for what I choose to do with it.
AI didn't decide Pay It Forward should exist
This distinction matters to me.
Sol helped me develop Pay It Forward incredibly quickly.
But AI didn't decide that Pay It Forward should exist.
That started with a human seeing another human problem and deciding they wanted to do something about it.
It came from recognising that sometimes the point in someone's life when they most need support is precisely the point when they don't have the financial resources to access it.
It came from empathy.
It came from experience.
It came from a belief that someone's circumstances shouldn't automatically determine whether they get an opportunity to change something.
AI helped turn that intention into something real.
But the intention came first.
And perhaps that's an important distinction when we think about the future.
Maybe humans versus AI is the wrong conversation
We're spending enormous amounts of time asking what AI will be able to do better than humans.
And there will be many things.
But I'm increasingly interested in another question.
What happens to humans when intelligence, information and creation are no longer as scarce as they once were?
Perhaps our value becomes less about how much information we can remember.
Less about how quickly we can produce something.
Less about possessing a technical skill that nobody else has access to.
And more about judgement.
Curiosity.
Discernment.
Critical thinking.
Imagination.
Responsibility.
The ability to recognise what matters.
And perhaps most importantly, our ability to care about what happens to another human being.
I don't think the future needs to be a competition between humans and AI.
I think we have an opportunity to ask something much bigger.
AI gives humanity extraordinary leverage.
So...
What are we going to point it at?
Fear is one response to technological change.
Blind optimism is another.
I don't think either is particularly useful on its own.
I'd rather understand it.
Question it.
Experiment with it.
Challenge it.
Think critically about its consequences.
And then consciously decide what I want to do with it.
Because perhaps the biggest risk isn't simply what AI becomes capable of doing.
Perhaps it's human beings gaining extraordinary new capabilities without stopping to ask what they're actually for.
And that brings me straight back to Pay It Forward.
Something that existed as a thought in my head this evening can now exist in the world.
If you'd like to use it to help someone else access support they might not otherwise be able to afford, you can Pay It Forward below.
You may never know who you helped.
You may never know what they went on to change.
You may never know how far the ripple travelled.
And perhaps that's part of the beauty of it. ❤️
And yes...
Sol helped me write this too.
So I could get on with doing something only humans can do.
BE A HUMAN. ❤️