We Have Always Done This
On tools, brains, and why the story of human evolution is far from over
Everyone is asking whether AI will make us weaker. I think that’s the wrong question.
Not because the concern isn’t real. It is. Studies show heavy AI users engaging less of their own cognitive capacity, outsourcing reasoning, producing work that converges toward the same bland middle. The fear of atrophy is legitimate. I hold it too.
But underneath that fear are two assumptions worth examining. The first: that we are fixed — that the human brain is a finished thing, vulnerable to whatever tools we bring near it, that intelligence is a quantity we can deplete. The second, subtler one: that we are passive. That given the option to let something else do the work, we simply surrender. That without friction, we stop growing.
If either of those were reliably true, we would not be here. We would not have survived the thousand disruptions that came before this one.
2.5 million years ago, our ancestors picked up stones and started hitting them together. Not to fight — to make something with an edge. Sharp enough to cut through bone, to butcher meat, to access nutrition their bare hands could never reach. It seems like a small, practical thing.
It wasn’t.
Scientists have scanned the brains of modern people performing those exact same stone-tool making tasks. What they found was startling. Making these tools — planning the angle of each strike, sequencing every step, holding the mental image of the finished shape while your hands work — activated an entire network of higher thinking: planning ahead, holding multiple things in mind at once, abstract reasoning.
That exact brain network is the one that activates when a trained pianist plays Chopin.
The tool didn’t just help them survive. It built the brain we now think with. The brain that writes music. That builds cities. That worries about AI.
This is what neuroplasticity looks like across deep time. You probably know the word from the conversation about rewiring your brain — breaking old habits, recovering from trauma, building a growth mindset. The idea that the brain isn’t fixed, that it physically changes in response to what we repeatedly do and use. That’s real, and it’s been real for millions of years. The region of the brain responsible for planning, self-control, and abstract thought expanded directly in response to the demands of making tools. Use shaped biology. Culture shaped brain. And then that bigger brain made more sophisticated culture, which demanded more from the brain, which grew again.
Not a straight line. A spiral upward. Each loop reaching somewhere the previous one couldn’t.
We were not born with these minds. We built them by building things.
Not every tool has made us more whole, though. And this matters.
The industrial revolution is the story we most often tell when we talk about progress — machines, efficiency, growth. And it was all of those things. But the data tells another story too.
Researchers analyzed personality tests from nearly 400,000 people in England and Wales and found something haunting: communities where coal-based factory industries dominated in the 19th century still show measurably higher rates of anxiety, depression, and disengagement than the rest of the country. Generations after the factories closed, the mark remains.
What left that mark? The factory didn’t just change where people worked. It changed the terms of being human. For the first time in history, a person’s worth was measured in output per hour. Work became repetitive, fragmented, disconnected from any visible whole. You made the same piece of the same thing, all day, every day, with no relationship to what it became or why it mattered. Marx called this alienation — being cut off from the meaning of what your hands make. Today, we might simply call it emptiness.
The industrial age made us more productive. And in doing so, it quietly diminished something harder to name — our sense of purpose, our connection to craft, our feeling of authorship over our own days. Something even deeper: our connection to our own humanness. To rhythm. To the body. To the kind of knowledge that comes not from efficiency but from being present inside your own life.
We adapted to the factory. But in the adaptation, something shrank.
Here is what others have said before me, and what I believe: the damage wasn’t the machine.
The damage came from the framework built around it — the decision to organize all of human life around productivity, to make output the measure of a person, to let the logic of the factory leak into every corner of existence. The tool was neutral. The choice of how to use it was not.
And eventually, we pushed back. The labor movement. The eight-hour day. The weekend. Later, slow food, the mindfulness industry, the four-day work week debates, the growing insistence that efficiency is not the same thing as meaning. The reckoning always comes slower than the disruption. But it comes, because humans have never been content to simply become what their tools asked of them.
We negotiate. We resist. We adapt and then we course-correct. This is not optimism, it is pattern recognition.
Researcher Anders Högberg challenged what he called the “fixed Stone Age brain” idea — the assumption that our minds are essentially frozen, helplessly shaped by whatever new pressure arrives. The human brain, he argues, is not like that. It never has been.
We are specifically, evolutionarily built to integrate tools into how we think — to rewire around them, to extend our capacity through them. It happened with stone tools. It happened with writing, which reorganized how the brain handles memory, abstraction, and time — literate people genuinely think differently than non-literate people, not better, but differently, with capacities the brain built to meet a new demand. It happened with clocks, which trained us to think in units smaller than seasons. Each technology found the brain ready — plastic, adaptive, capable of integrating something new without losing what it already was.
The question for AI is not whether it will change us. Of course it will. The question is: change us toward what?
Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, has said that humans and AI together create more meaningful work than either could alone. I keep returning to this — because it describes something I recognize in practice. When you bring your own full thinking to AI rather than handing your thinking over to it, something generative happens. You go further than you would have gone alone. Not in a flat, additive way. In a way where the combination produces something neither could have reached separately.
Think about what changes when intelligence becomes abundant. When the ability to research, synthesize, translate, analyze, draft — when all of that becomes widely available. What becomes scarce then?
Judgment. Taste. Conviction. Curiosity that goes somewhere personal. The willingness to be genuinely moved by something. The capacity to ask a question nobody thought to ask. Intuition built from years of paying attention to a particular thing. The things that are hardest to automate emerge from somewhere AI cannot reach — a life lived, with a body, with loss, with the particular friction of being a specific person who has witnessed things that changed you.
In a world of abundant intelligence, what grows scarce and therefore precious is perspective.
And this is where something extraordinary becomes possible. When you bring AI’s breadth — its access to everything humanity has ever written, thought, and discovered — together with a human’s depth, their judgment, their taste, their irreducibly personal sense of what matters — you don’t get a smarter tool user. You get something that didn’t exist before. Knowledge with both scale and soul. The reach of everything, directed by someone with a reason to care.
There are two paths from here, and they are genuinely different.
The passive one: we let AI begin every thought for us. We stop sitting with questions long enough to form real opinions. We hand over the discomfort of not-knowing because AI relieves it instantly — and not-knowing is uncomfortable. We drift. Our judgment atrophies from disuse, not from the presence of a tool, but from our own choice to step back from thinking.
The active one: we arrive with something already forming — a half-thought, a question, a feeling we’re trying to understand — and we use AI to go further with it. We stay the author. The tool extends us rather than replaces us.
The difference between the two paths is not the technology. It is intention. And intention is something only we can bring.
We faced exactly this choice with every technology before this one. The people who thrived were never those who used tools least. They were the ones who stayed clear about what they still needed to bring themselves.
We are 2.5 million years into this conversation between humans and their tools.
The stone tool built language. Writing built collective memory. The printing press built the Enlightenment. The factory built alienation — and then, in response, built the labor movement, and eventually the question of what a human life is worth beyond what it produces. Every major disruption forced a reckoning. Every reckoning clarified something essential about who we are and what we refuse to give up.
We are in the middle of one of those moments right now. Not at the end, where we can assess calmly. In the middle, where it is loud and uncertain and the fear is understandable.
But the evidence is in the scientific record and in the full sweep of human history. What our tools built in us — the planning, the abstraction, the music, the philosophy, the stubborn insistence on meaning — is real and measurable and points consistently in one direction.
We have always done this. Picked up the new thing, been changed by it, pushed back against what it asked of us that felt wrong, kept what mattered, and arrived somewhere more than we were before.
This time is no different. And what becomes possible — if we meet this moment with our full humanity intact, with our judgment and taste and conviction and curiosity showing up alongside the tool — isn’t diminishment.
It's an expansion we cannot yet fully imagine. But if history is any guide, and I believe it is, we will build our way into it. We always have.
Human Pulse is about living intentionally with technology — not by resisting it, but by showing up to it fully human. If this essay found you at the right moment, share it with someone who needs a different story about where we’re headed.