The other side of the hill

I'm sitting in our campervan, in the middle of the woods. It's raining softly. I haven't actually been outside today, even though I'm surrounded by it on all sides. Because I'm "just quickly" working on something. My head is full of a list, and with every item I think: I can just do this with AI. Just figure it out. Just optimize it. Just see what Claude Code makes of it.

That "just quickly" has become a fixed pattern over the past few months. It starts with an intention. I type what I want, and ten minutes later it's there, almost fully realized. My brain tingles. At first it feels great. But that tingling increasingly turns into restlessness. Because there's no physical resistance left in the creation, the ideas keep piling up. I think it, and within ten minutes it exists. Then the refining begins. The real problem is: because friction is absent, the refining never stops. Before I know it, four hours have passed, my head is full of concepts, but I'm sitting alone behind my screen. While my body wants to go outside.

I work at the intersection of design, technology, and social innovation. Self-employed since 2018. I design processes, facilitate co-creative sessions, coach design students. I believe the answers are already in the group, and that you only need to make them visible. Over the past few years I've been exploring more and more how AI can help with that: when people are trying to figure something out together and build something. A little under a year ago I started working with Claude Code. Not to develop software, but to search for larger patterns across dozens of session transcripts. All those experiments eventually came together in the Social AI Field Guide: twelve techniques, three phases, and six principles. Actually, all the lessons learned from practice, about AI and human collaboration, bundled into one whole.

I've always been a maker. The wooden garden table at our house: from the drawing to the sawing and gluing. The puzzling over the bolt system, the endless sanding and oiling. Or our camper, which I converted together with my girlfriend. I know that feeling well: making something with my hands, and then sitting at it, or driving in it, and thinking: we made this.

But over the past few months, that sense of making has shifted. As an experiment, I built a working app prototype in under twenty hours. I had to set the direction, and it cost me a lot of mental energy and endless refining. Constantly reacting to what came out: ooh, maybe add this, and that could be better. But it felt fundamentally different from cutting the wood myself. Physical tools, whether that's a Festool saw or the trackpad of a MacBook, amplify what I can do. But AI builds independently. You have to turn it on, you have to think about where to aim it, but the capacity to make feels different.

I noticed something similar when I printed a set of toy cars for my nephew on my 3D printer. I hadn't made the model myself, but I chose the filament, the colors, the finish. I had my nephew in mind while I was choosing the colors. And that's actually what I think makes the difference. A handwritten card is something very different from a bouquet you order online that gets delivered by someone you don't know. The effort you put into something is attention. Attention you gave to someone, even in their absence. When a child makes something for you at school, it's not beautiful because it's beautiful. It's beautiful because they were thinking of you while they made it. Take that effort away, and what remains is a transaction.

The difference seems to lie in resistance. Resistance forces me to slow down, and in that slowing down, space opens up for conscious attention.

I feel this in my Field Guide. Although the experience and insights are mine, AI removed so much of the thinking resistance in structuring it that my brain hasn't stored it as though I typed it word by word myself. Off the top of my head, I can't recite all seven pages of phase two by heart. It feels as though I've become the conductor of an orchestra: I oversee the big picture, but I've become disconnected from playing the instrument. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. The knowledge is mine. The experience packed into it is mine. And without AI, the Field Guide wouldn't have existed, I'm almost certain of that. My rule was: it can only contain things where, if someone asks me about it, I can rely on my own memory to give an answer. That foundation holds. But the tension between what's exciting and what's lost, I feel it every time.

The creeping nature of it is what gets to me the most. For days on end I sit comfortably isolated, refining. Because nothing gets stuck, I dictate another new concept and press enter ten more times for another iteration. Sometimes I recognize the impulse as it arises. Oh right, this is another one of those things I could just go and build now. And then the question: do I want to do this now, or do I want to go outside? Sometimes I manage. Sometimes I don't. I'm right in the middle of it.

And I don't think I'm the only one. Australia recently banned social media for children under sixteen. We've felt the impact of social media for a long time, but only now are we starting to act on it. I think something similar is going to happen with AI, but faster and with more impact. Because where social media plays on comparison, I think AI touches something more fundamental: creation without effort.

Our wellbeing runs largely on a handful of hormones: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. They're about doing things, belonging, feeling connection, and the sense that you've put effort into something. Our biological foundation is built on creating value for ourselves and for others. On effort. On being of use. Take that away, and something stops adding up. I suspect that's not a coincidence.

If technology can take over our knowledge work, and I think that can happen, then I think it's no longer just about work. Then it's about fulfillment. About what makes you sit on the couch in the evening and think: today was a good day.

I don't have an answer to that yet. But I suspect it has something to do with being of use to other people. With using our hands. With the roughness of real human collaboration: the discussion, the discomfort, the alignment, and the joy of shared success. I wonder whether the space that AI frees up might be exactly the opportunity to put our effort somewhere else: into connection, into collaboration, into the slow process of truly listening to each other.

Maybe I'm fooling myself. Maybe the idea that I'm figuring all this out for the benefit of others is just a nice story I tell myself. I don't know. But the curiosity is real, and I'm giving myself over to it.

What it looks like on the other side of the hill, when we live alongside technology that is smarter than us and that can do more and more of what we can do, I can't see yet. I think nobody can. But there are people already thinking about it, and nobody has the answer yet.

So in the end I did close my to-do list, pushed open the camper door, and went walking in the cold. Through the woods, in the wind, a bit of sun here and there. While walking, I dictated this essay out loud into a voice memo. There is something about moving your body and thinking out loud that makes things start to flow. And there is something about being outside, among the trees, where nothing judges you.

Of course, once I'd warmed up at the little table in the camper, I dove back behind my laptop to work the draft into this text together with that very same AI. The irony is certainly not lost on me. But that walk through the rain, that resistance, that was mine.