Welcome to Monday’s reflection.
Today I reflect on humanity’s extraordinary ability to make life easier, and why every struggle we remove seems to be replaced by another demand.
Human history could be told as the story of people trying to make life a little easier.
Someone discovered how to make fire rather than simply enduring the cold. We learned how to grow food instead of spending every day searching for it. We domesticated animals, invented the wheel, built machines, generated electricity and eventually created devices capable of doing in seconds what once took hours.
Most of this has been amazing.
There is nothing noble about spending an entire day washing clothes by hand when a machine can do it for us. Few of us would choose to return to a world without modern medicine, central heating, cars, refrigeration or countless other inventions that have removed difficulties previous generations simply had to live with.
Now artificial intelligence is beginning to do something similar with parts of our mental workload. Routine administration can be automated. Information that once took hours to find can appear almost instantly. Emails can be summarised, documents organised and repetitive tasks completed while we get on with something else. I use some of these tools myself, and like my washing, there are tasks I am very happy never to do manually again.
Yet recently I have found myself wondering: Why do we keep inventing ways to make life easier, only to make increasingly greater demands upon ourselves?
