Nevolin

3 min read

AI Optimist or Pessimist? Why Every Tool Stronger Than Us Made Life Better

From clothes and wheels to the internet and AI: we have always built tools stronger than ourselves. Why I'm an AI optimist and don't think the boom has peaked.

Are you an AI optimist or pessimist?

I'm an optimist. Not because I think AI is perfect, but because I look at what humans have always done with tools, and how it turned out.

We have always built things stronger than ourselves

We humans naturally seek innovation. We keep using things that are:

  • stronger than our skin (clothes and armor)
  • stronger than our hands (tools)
  • stronger than our backs and legs (wheels, carts, animals)
  • faster than us (bikes, cars, trains, trucks)
  • more convenient (pigeons, radio, TV, phones, internet)
  • and today much smarter than us (AI)

Seen like that, AI is not some alien break with history. It's the next item on a very long list.

Every step came with doubts, and it was worth it

Each of these innovations always came with a dose of criticism, doubts and challenges. But it always resulted in a better society and quality of life.

That is not a guarantee that nothing goes wrong. Every one of those steps had real downsides that people had to deal with. But I don't know anyone who would trade their life for one without clothes, tools, transport or the internet. The doubts were real, and in the long run the benefits were bigger.

How far AI has come since 2017

The tech industry has come a long way, in a very short amount of time. I still remember my first AI projects back in 2017, training LSTM and RNN models. That was the state of the art for a lot of language work at the time. The Transformer architecture, which almost every modern language model builds on, was only published that same year.

It's important to look back and appreciate where we stand as a civilisation. For that I highly recommend this presentation by Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist for Google Research and Google DeepMind: Important Trends in AI: How Did We Get Here, What Can We Do Now, and Where are We Headed? (Distinguished Colloquium, February 10, 2026).

I'll admit I'm somewhat envious of all the exciting stuff frontier labs are doing.

The AI boom has not peaked

Every few months someone announces that the AI boom has stalled. Folks claiming AI boom stalled and peaked have no idea what's coming next.

I wrote that line under NVIDIA's Spectrum-6 announcement, networking built for gigascale AI factories. You don't build infrastructure at that scale for a technology that's done. The people closest to the hardware are still building as if the biggest part is ahead of us, and I think they're right.

Nobody is ready, and the future is bright

Under a post about AI tackling one of the Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics, I wrote:

Nobody is ready for any of this. But the future is bright, if we let it.

Both parts are true. Nobody is ready: not our schools, not our companies, not our governments. But being unready has been the normal state of humanity at every step on that list above. We adapt, and we end up better off.

The "if we let it" is the important part. The biggest risk I see is not the technology. It's that we spend all our energy resisting it instead of using it.

So, optimist or pessimist? I know where I stand.