We’ve always built tools to make life easier as Sheridan notes. For most of history, that meant offloading physical work or boring, repetitive tasks like the bulldozer example. These tools gave us extra muscle or saved time on tedious chores, but we still had to do the thinking part.
AI is different because it takes on the thinking itself—the cognitive tasks that used to require a person . You could use a past tool like spell-check to fix typos, but an AI can, and already does, write a whole paragraph for you. That’s a fundamental shift, and it’s why AI feels less like a simple helper and more like a new kind of partner (or sometimes a competitor) in our work.