Today is Earth Day, it feels strange that we need to dedicate a single day to celebrate nature as if we are something separate from it. Nature moves in rhythms. It takes time, it cycles, pauses, and recalibrates.

Many of us kind of lost that rhythm to the “machine”. We move fast, scale faster, and barely pause. We may be drifting off that natural rhythm, off of our own slow ways. It contrasts with our biological pace as a part of a nature’s system, where our own sapience has been refined over a spann of thousands of years. In today’s creative landscape, the “machine”, AI has unlocked a capacity to produce and iterate infinitely and instantly, and is transforming how we work.

There has been some studies about AI removing cognitive (and social) friction, it reduces the necessary ‘heavy lifting,’ of cognitive engagement, also described as cognitive offloading. That’s where we shift parts of thinking, reasoning, and memorise onto systems such as the AI. Although it doesn’t diminish our intelligence, it just changes how much we actively use it. There have been other developments in the past that have changed our cognitive abilities, such as going from handwriting to typing and probably many other developments.

If it’s merely about the output, we will be replaced, but if it’s about the process then we are invaluable. And I believe deeply on the latter. If we look at how the human brain processes an idea organically in our brains, we see the layers of intention, conceptual thinking, perception of the world, and lived consciousness. With “compressing of the path” from idea to outcome, we may miss the perspective we bring to it. Maybe it’s the nuances of slow process, messy mistakes, the discarded drafts and hours of contemplation that gives an output its soul. The very thing that so many feel is missing from AI-generated work, the human signature that AI can’t replicate.