Hello World… How I Learned to Stop Fearing AI

We Begin in the Muck

Before the skyscrapers. Before the engines. Before the screens, satellites, and silicone dreams, we were cold. We were hungry. We were prey.

We huddled in caves while the wind howled like a curse, and the night seemed bottomless. Our children died of infection. Our elders slipped on wet stones and never got up. The darkness didn’t just frighten us. It consumed us.

And then someone struck two rocks together, and we made fire.

That’s the origin story, not just of civilization, but of us. The human being.

We don’t have claws. We don’t have fur thick enough to keep us warm or teeth sharp enough to defend ourselves. What we have, what we’ve always had, is the genetic directive to look at a limitation and say:“I refuse to accept this.”

We innovate because we refuse to yield.

We adapt, because survival is not enough. We require transcendence.

So we lit the dark. We domesticated plants. We smashed trees into paper and grapes into a beverage less likely to sicken us than river water. We carved symbols into stone and made memory stretch across generations.

With each breakthrough, we created the conditions for something greater. And we also created new dangers, new tradeoffs, new complexities. But that didn’t stop us.

Innovation is not harmful to the human condition. It is the beating heart of what it means to be human. From the first time we smashed rocks together to make fire to the moment we taught machines to think, we have always been in a long, messy, beautiful conversation with our limitations.

I live in that conversation. I’m one of the rare people working in both innovation and conservation, in both the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. I help build the future while fighting to preserve what can be preserved. I don’t see those roles as opposites. They’re two halves of the same human instinct: to respond, to adapt, and to shape the world around us into something better as unobtrusively as possible to the natural world. I don’t believe that even the most ardent conservationist I work with is willing to live on picked berries and wood grubs while their children shiver in the darkness.

The Innovation Cycle

Human progress isn’t a straight line. It’s a spiral... a pattern that loops forward, always solving a problem and always discovering a bigger one in the process. This isn’t a bug. It is the defining feature of our distinctive nature.

We start with a limitation that becomes unbearable. So we innovate. And that innovation works... until it doesn’t. Until it creates pressures or consequences that demand something new again. The cycle continues, and civilization advances.

Take Transit.

Once, we moved only by foot. We hunted, gathered, and lived in small tribal territories. That meant limited access to resources, low population density, and short lifespans. So we saddled horses. Suddenly, we could range farther. Trade flourished. Cities grew. So did disease. So did waste. In 1894, London was drowning in horse manure, and the world’s great cities were facing what seemed like a permanent sanitation crisis. Enter the automobile and indoor plumbing. Cars ended the manure problem and changed everything. They reshaped cities, gave us unprecedented freedom, and created new economies. But they also gave us traffic, smog, deadly accidents, and ultimately the climate crisis. Now, electric vehicles offer a solution. Cleaner, quieter, climate-friendly. But the EV revolution comes with new challenges: a grid never designed for mass electrified transit, raw material constraints, and the question of whether we can produce and distribute enough electricity without breaking the system.

Every step is progress. And every step comes with weight.

The same cycle plays out in communication.

We began with oral tradition. Our stories died when we did. So we carved symbols into stone, then we mashed wood and put letters on papyrus, then printed books. Literacy spread, but so did propaganda. Every new method of communication gave voice to more people… not all of them with good intent. Radio, television, the internet... each expanded our reach while complicating our trust. Social media connected the world in real time and fractured it just as quickly. We speak effortlessly now, across continents and celestial bodies alike. And we struggle to agree on what's real.

Education? Same pattern.

Once, we learned only from elders keeping knowledge close but shallow. Then we built schools, universities, and libraries. Access grew. So did inequality. Those with proximity to great institutions advanced. Others were left behind. Digital learning broke barriers again. Suddenly, a child in a rural village could watch a physics lecture from MIT. But with that miracle came new inequities: broadband access, digital literacy, attention economics. We democratized education... and discovered that access alone doesn’t guarantee understanding.

Industry followed the same arc.

Manual labor became mechanized. Mechanization became automation. With each leap, we created more productivity... and displaced more workers. We made more goods. We used more energy. We shrank poverty and strained ecosystems. Every win carried a price.

This is the innovation cycle. It isn’t failure. It’s evolution. It's not that progress causes problems. It's that solving problems uncovers deeper ones. And we move forward by engaging with the complexity, not retreating from it.

That’s the conversation I want to keep having. Because the alternative isn’t utopia. It’s stagnation. And stagnation isn’t safe. It’s just familiar.

The Trap of Nostalgic Simplicity

There’s a persistent belief... quiet in some people, loud in others... that we took a wrong turn somewhere. That things were better before. Before cars. Before phones. Before the internet. Before the discovery of DNA. Now, before AI.

This belief is deeply human. It’s rooted in grief. We miss the world we understood. We miss when change felt optional. But nostalgia isn’t memory. It’s selective memory. It forgets the limits that made innovation necessary in the first place.

Every major leap forward has been met with distrust. Books changed how we remember. Radio changed how we listen. Television changed how we observe. But we didn’t collapse. We adapted. Now, it’s AI’s turn to be the monster under the bed.

I hear the same refrain: “This is different.” But so was every previous disruption. What makes this one different enough to abandon our proven pattern of adaptation? That’s the question I ask the skeptics.

Why is this the thing you think we can't overcome?

What makes this challenge too big for humanity’s millennia-old pattern of resolution?

The underlying concern is: We don’t know how to solve the problems yet. And that’s fair. But that’s always the case at the beginning.

The reason people oppose new advances isn’t because adaptation is truly impossible. It’s because the person who will eventually solve it hasn’t told us how yet. And once they do... once the path becomes visible... critics will shift their concerns to the next innovation that hasn’t been figured out yet.

That cycle of fear doesn’t map to truth. It maps to discomfort. To unfamiliarity.

And even if fear were enough to justify turning away... what would that look like?

Now here's the second question, one we don’t ask enough:

If something powerful is outlawed, and only the lawless use it... then what?

What happens when the bad actors build tools they control, while the rest of us look away in the name of principles or fear? Power doesn’t disappear when we forbid it. It just stops being shared.

That’s not safety. That’s surrender.

AI is part of the same innovation cycle we’ve always lived in. It solves problems. It creates new ones. And we are called, again, to the same human task: to shape the future with intention, not abdication.

Romanticizing the past won’t protect us. It never has. It just leaves us unprepared.

Choosing Our Limitations

Every innovation asks us to trade one limitation for another. We never get to be free of limits entirely. What we *do* get is the power to choose which ones we’re willing to live with.

That choice is often uncomfortable. It’s easy to look at the downsides of something new and say, “This is too risky.” But that decision demands another question:

If this limitation or risk is too great, which yesterday should we fall back to?

Let’s talk about EVs.

Electric vehicles come with real challenges. The grid isn’t ready in every community. The charging infrastructure is uneven.  Access to EVs is not even trying to be socially just.  The raw materials are complex and global. But if we decide these new limitations are unacceptable, we need to ask:

Are we choosing to go back to climate change?

Are we choosing to go back to urban centers overwhelmed with petroleum exhaust and chronic respiratory illness?

Or further back... are we ready to defend mountains of horse manure lining the streets?

Or further still... a life where everything we do must be within ten miles of our birth, because our feet can go no farther?

People who oppose new ideas should be prepared to defend the limitations they want to return to. If the risks of clean energy are too much, then honestly make the case that fossil fuels are better assuming that existing limitations of clean energy will be resolved. If electrification is too slow, then defend the notion of doing nothing.

It’s not wrong to weigh risk. But we have to weigh it honestly. Every retreat has a price. Every old system came with suffering we fought to leave behind.

We aren’t choosing between a dangerous future and a safe past. We’re choosing between the limitations we already know how to suffer through, and the ones we haven’t yet figured out how to survive.

There is nothing more human than to believe in the pursuit of advancement... because it might make things better.

The Moral Courage to Continue Innovating

Conservation has long taken the form of resistance. A philosophy of "stop." Stop building. Stop expanding. Stop changing.

This view is rooted in a classical sense of conservatism that treats the past as sacred and the future as suspect. It insists that preservation requires stasis. That the only way to protect what matters is to freeze the world in place or worse, to restore an old version of what previously constrained humanity.

I reject that narrow vision. New OR old. What was good yesterday OR the possibility of tomorrows greatness. We must embrace the potential of AND… the possibility of holding onto what was good in the past while reaching for what is possible in the future.

In my view, conservation is not about stasis. It is about stewardship. And stewardship does not mean standing still. It means guiding change with wisdom and care.

We cannot preserve the natural by denying the existence of technological progress. We cannot protect the human spirit by forbidding its evolution. We cannot honor our ancestors by refusing our descendants the freedom to solve the problems we were too afraid to face.

Conservation itself must evolve.

It should adapt to a role of curation—guiding how we live and work in ways that respect our past, honor the natural world, and function within today’s technological, economic, and social frameworks.

Because to be human is to change. To learn. To reach. To go beyond the limits that we fear are immutable.

And whether our passion is rain forests, or the gender spectrum, or racial purity... we must have the moral courage to challenge ourselves to answer the question “How can we meet our needs in a changed world?”

Not blindly or recklessly. But with stewardship and conviction.

To innovate is not to abandon our values. It is to trust them enough to allow them to grow into what they will be tomorrow.

We Aren’t the Disease. We’re the Cure.

Certainly the world has problems. Big ones. But the belief that humanity is the source of those problems... that we are the virus, the blight, the error in the system... is not only false. It’s dangerous.

Because if we believe that human action is inherently corrupting, we will retreat. We will stop trying. We will surrender our shared future.

There is no humanity without principled innovation. There is no progress without risk. No healing without effort. No survival without the courage to invent something better.

To be human is to see the limits of the world we inherited... and imagine the possible that makes everyone's lives better. To build it. To refine it. To fail, to try again, and to keep going. We are poised to expand beyond the planet of our origin, and we didn’t get here by huddling in caves.

Innovation is not harmful when pursued with justice. It is not dangerous when coupled with conscience. It’s not perverse when guided by compassion.

The future we want will not be found by avoiding change. It will be built by people who choose to change with one foot planted in intentional improvement and the other in stewardship.

We are the ones who see what’s broken and try to fix it. Who protect. Who adapt. Who rise.

That is the story I believe in. That is the work I live for.