You Don’t Need To Build It To Use It
The Stone Age had it figured out, we just forgot
I have had visions of smooth, sharp flint spearheads this week, finding some convincing shapes in the garden. I started thinking about the quality of tools, and wondering when we stopped making them ourselves? In the Stone Age everybody made their own tools as well as use them. Making and using them sat with one person. Survival skills.
And then, copper arrived and later again the bronze age and all that changed. Not a one-man operation. Making the tools became much more specialist. You needed knowledge, specialist conditions - at least in terms of heat and more than a one-person cave on a mountainside. So most people stopped making. You didn’t need to understand how to mix metal and actually make tools. You simply had to use them. A farmer didn’t need to know how to build, he just needed to want a better plough. The hunter got a better spear. It was improvement.
We have always let the specialist be master of the making of it and the rest of us master the using of it. This didn’t slow us down, it accelerated us.
The Pattern Continues For Centuries
Fast forward to today. We all use phones and a fraction of us know exactly how to get the full maximum amount of them let alone build them. We drive cars that few of us know how to build. Each of us has a body most of us will never fully understand, let alone will be able to build it at a cellular level. Our body is perhaps the most sophisticated computer we will ever own and we don’t even need instructions to use it. (perhaps we need some to look after it but that’s probably a different article.)
The Internet, the electricity, and for a large part also the foods we consume. When did we ever all really need to know how to build it in order to use it? We don’t even know or need to know how to fully understand it in order to get started.
Now AI arrives and I am feeling that AI is being treated differently. AI admittedly it’s going to be a disruptor. It’s a paradigm shift. Yet we’re either hesitating to start because we don’t understand it, or feeling that to do well with it means we need to build.
Where is the messaging coming from?
I caught myself doing it too this week. I’m learning to use AI but as I dabble and play with multiple tools, I am diving in but also, I’m wondering should I be learning differently?
When I see social media, news, new products, events, I realize it’s all around us culturally. Let’s build, let’s create with it. High energy and excitement.
Somewhere within that mixture of passion to get going, and anxiety to not be left behind, is the same assumption. Should we all be building and if we are not, then are we falling behind?
Seeing it differently
Without seeing it instantly, I was all scooped up in the noise around me with builders being close to me. I felt I should be doing that too. I almost outsourced my thinking. I took someone else’s lens.
The builder bias that I’m feeling surrounding AI is not driven from bad intentions or aspirations. It’s simply that the loudest voices at least in proximity to me are skewed more to builders.
But most people aren’t builders. I’m not necessarily a builder. You don’t need to be either.
AI doesn’t need to be different but it does need the confidence and even the permission to get started.
The anxiety of the fear many people have about AI is only natural. This is new but we remove that fear and find more clarity when we stop confusing AI literacy with AI engineering.
Just as we expect everybody to read, but we don’t expect everybody to write a book. This era is one where we should help everybody to adopt AI to be curious about AI, but that doesn’t mean build.
Aim for fluency. Simply learn to be comfortable with and around the tools.
My AI insight this week was not technical. It was simply that some patterns from the past are worth repeating. We saw a new tool, we accepted a new tool, picked up a new tool and used a new tool.
So my question for you is simple:
Are you surrounded by builders or users? That answer will tell you whose lens you are looking through.
Have a great week.