Essay · 2025
Blood, Books and Bots
The true origins of AI
The first known use of AI is actually much earlier than people think.
In fact it was during the Palaeolithic era, probably around 100,000 years ago.
Imagine the first time a human ever used blood or ochre to daub her handprint onto the rock surface. Art teachers rightfully describe her (or him) as the ur-painter; the first artist. The first handprints and other cave paintings were the true origin and deep root of all human art. But this was also one of the first known uses of artificial intelligence.
Because this first artwork was not purely decorative. As a palaeolithic nomad, the caves she would visit in her life were too many to remember. To properly make meaning and to storify her existence, she had to augment her natural intelligence, manipulating both tools, and the very environment – the rockface into which she inscribed this first “token”. This would be around the time of the advent of spoken language – itself an early iteration of AI – a shared cultural construct that gives rise to shared meaning making, and what Harari calls “intersubjective reality”.
Cave art eventually became the symbolic written language with which we humans would steadily continue to augment and extend the power of our memories and of our minds. But AI was just getting started. Books, and, later, the printing press, were early iterations of AI, ones which facilitated the worldwide spread of mathematics, and the scientific method.
The next iteration came in the form of semiconductors, microchips, computing, data centers, and the World Wide Web. This last version of AI became our collective memory, a digital home for the entire corpus or “text” of humankind: A massive repository of symbolic language, spanning from right back to those cave-dwelling days.
And now GenAI emerges as the latest version of what has always simply been AI – ie: the human tendency to augment our natural abilities with various external tools (both material and intellectual ones). It’s already cliché to mention that the previous iterations – All the ones I just mentioned, plus machine learning; social media algos; the denoising on your phone’s camera etc. – that, once perfected, they lose that “AI” moniker, and become just regular old “tech”.
The previous industrial revolution largely decoupled strength from economic agency – I can get stronger, it might make me healthier and more attractive, sure, but it won’t necessarily make me richer – what the previous IRs did for Strength, this AI Industrial revolution will do for Intelligence.
And so, for many of us, whose vocations involve being clever, realistically AI is coming for our jobs. It’s the crude economics of capitalist market logic and machines just becoming better faster and cheaper.
Unless what you do specifically requires humans… They say preachers, & politicians are safe… Similarly, certain traditional shamanic healers, and also human touch based arts like reiki practitioners are fine. Probably most nursing staff, as well as child and elderly care workers, and other such roles are also generally safer. The likes of sex workers, exotic dancers and other escorts are probably all good. The rest of us, not so much. Difficult to predict really.
That said, we could expect the economy to be coerced into a major reconfiguration fairly soon. I’m not sure how it’ll look, but the scale of job loss will mean there is precious little spending and therefore no GDP growth, so governments’ hands will eventually be forced into heavy structural economic reform.
The moral stigma against AI, just like with the previous iterations, is largely based on deeper cultural narratives and (understandable) fears about our own purpose and meaning-making in life, rather than rational thought. It’s a fear encoded in our stories that warn against the likes of AI – from Prometheus; the Golem of Jewish folklore; or Frankenstein’s monster, and (examples from my day) The Terminator; The Matrix; & Black Mirror.
The synth, the camera, the loom, and the automobile were all accompanied by the same pitch-fork wielding mobs that we see arrayed in spiritual vengeance on Facebook and LinkedIN against AI today. All of these technologies too were considered “cheating”, and worse: “dangerous,” “egregious”; even “threatening to unravel the very moral fabric of society” in their time.
However, we accepted them once we realised that on balance, they actually tend to do more good than harm. AI does more good than harm. Be honest, that’s why you’re here, on your device; itself a form of AI.
And by the way, Socrates proclaimed the same thing about one of the earliest versions of AI – writing itself! He warned writing would erode memory, imperil critical thinking, and basically make us stupider all-round. Perhaps he was not wrong.
AI is not Cheating, AI is not moral decay. It’s not a moral virtue either. It’s technology. It’s a tool. AI is the new brush. The new pen, the new keyboard, and the new camera. It doesn’t replace those older ones, it’s just a new one to add to your toolkit-slash-techstack.
AI is not Evil. Nor is it good. It’s a cultural technology and it is a tool. It happens to be the most intricate, complex one humans have yet devised – as a software object, but also just on a purely physical level, if we look at the network of data centers, each one using as much power as a city, that spans the globe. And there’s a LOT more coming. Turns out, there’s massive money to be made in turning dumb electrons into smart ones, and the uber-wealthy are scrambling over each other to build them, even as I write this. But I digress…
To be clear, tech progress doesn’t necessarily bring about moral or even human quality of life progress. As humans we seem to perpetually disagree so vehemently that war is a constant feature of our story arc. Tech hasn’t solved inequality, starvation or other kinds of suffering. Many think we were happier on the whole back in the hunter gatherer days. Who knows?
But tech progress is some kind of progress. Harari sees it as the evolution – and ever-evolving complexity -of information networks, tracing a clear arc from single-celled organisms to the space-faring interstellar beings we might eventually become.
In the story of the stone soup a small group of strangers makes a soup of pure water and some stones. Of course this is made possible because of many small gifts, gestures and donations of ingredients over time.
It’s the same with AI. The “magic trick” of AI, the uncanny, Turing-test-passing illusion of sentience – is only possible because we all contributed to it, (at least anyone with any sort of digital footprint). In an ideal world AI would be something like a communal stone soup; something that we all get to eat from, and reap the benefits of collectively.
Wishing AI away doesn’t help. Wishing we could turn the tech-clock back ten years doesn’t help. Our job as the adults in the room is to accept reality and technology as it stands, and then work to reorganise society and the economy accordingly.
