Shortly after we moved into our house I built a fence.

I was twenty years younger, twenty years broker, and a little naive. 

I bought a post hole digging hand tool, a contraption that looked like two miniature shovels cupped together into a pair of extended tongs. And then I spent the next month in my backyard, nearly every night, digging each of the thirty-odd holes for the posts. Each needed to be about three feet deep, and each was dug through a layer of compressed clay fill that was often just slightly less solid than concrete.

The next summer my neighbour built a fence around his yard. He called a guy who showed up with a can of spray paint to mark the post locations and drove a machine into the yard with an auger dangling from the front. They drilled thirty holes in about two hours while my neighbour sat and watch with a beer in his hand.

We humans make tools. And then we make better tools. And then we attach those tools to machines and eventually the machines do all the hard work.

Choosing which tool you are going to use, and how much of the process you are going to automate continues to be a choice we will all have, and how we make that choice will continue to factor in countless variables. 

Twenty years ago I chose a hand digger because I was young and cheap and had an abundance of free time to kill. My neighbour chose a machine because he couldn’t be bothered to spend a month sweating over thirty holes in his backyard but still needed a fence.

We can argue a lot of things about AI, about when and how we use it, the morality of it, and the ethics of employing it, but I think we always need to pause and remember that of all the terrible things it is and does, ultimately it’s just a more efficient tool that people who need work done do—or do not—choose to use.

And more importantly, we can’t have an honest conversation about a tool until we put it in the context to understand ourselves and our choices around it.

That’s it.