``` abstract
I'm not an AI skeptic. I welcomed it into my work - eagerly, even. But I think we're at a genuinely new threshold: the first time in our species' history where the material thinks back. That doesn't make it dangerous. It makes it worth being careful about how much we let it shape the work — and us. 

This essay is meant to open doors, not walk with you through them, because thinking every now and then is actually great. Who would've thought?
```

# Building with Intelligence

A carpenter doesn't ask the wood how to hold it. The grain is visible; the weight is felt. The abstraction, "board," "joint," “frame”, lives in the carpenter's hands, not in the material.

*But I do ask. I ask constantly.*

## Wait, I’m no carpenter

What I am, though, is an engineer (I never liked the term programmer), and a designer, both of which grew in me in parallel, neither preceeded the other. And lately, I find myself asking my material about itself.

## We can agree that

AI only works on what's been abstracted for it.

What do I mean by this? Think about it, in many systems AI produces ’structured objects’ that can be interpreted by the receiving end to eventually ‘create’ the results for the human in the loop. Whether those objects are plain string, formatted LaTeX, code, json, or actions, doesn’t really matter, they are all in the end just objects, and apart from the words, wouldn’t	be very useful to the end user by themselves.

## But, so do we - or did?

Most things we work with are also in a way abstracted for us, modern programming languages are very far from the days of machine code. But way before computers, one of the oldest abstractions is language itself, an abstraction over our thoughts. Tools and weapons became an abstraction over intent. 

### So, is there any difference between then and now?

Yes. I would argue those abstractions were ours. We built them to fit our hands, our eyes, our cognition.
Moreover, those abstractions were more often than not carrying the opinions of their creator - the weight distribution in the tool, the way the word flutters the vocal cords when it is spoken, the way a certain feature of the programming language works, and we could go on. It wasn’t *the best way*, there was no best way.

Now we build abstractions so the machine can build, it's less about how I or anyone in particular thinks the abstraction should be, but what the machine…*prefers*?
And it builds abstractions back. For us? Or for itself?

Maybe both, maybe neither, but it leaves an even bigger question on the table.

## Who's steering?

I asked the machine to help me write this. It did. It edited what I gave it. I edited what it edited. Somewhere in here is a point I'm trying to make. I think it's mine. 
I stopped before it agreed with me it’s done, because I *decide* when it’s done.

Metal also made us work around it, taught us how to bend and shape it. 
But metal never thought for us, *did it?*