For most of history, people made their own tools. Industry made tools far more powerful, and also put making them out of reach. AI is starting to hand part of that ability back: first with software, and perhaps next with hardware.
A long time ago, most of the tools people used were tools they made themselves.
Before farming, people made their own stone tools, bows, and containers.
Even after farming took hold, many people still made and repaired their own tools. A farmer might build or adapt their own implements and work out their own fixes for whatever problem was in front of them.
There wasn't much distance between a tool and the person using it.
Then, slowly, that changed.
As societies grew more complex, knowledge became specialized.
Smelting, machinery, construction, chemistry, electricity... more and more things took years of study and a lot of equipment to do.
With the industrial age, the shift became obvious.
Tools started to be mass-produced in factories.
We no longer had to build our own cars, televisions, washing machines, or computers. We just bought them and used them.
That was enormous progress.
Specialization made tools more sophisticated and more reliable, and it let ordinary people enjoy abilities that once belonged to very few.
But something else happened at the same time:
we got better and better at using tools, and less and less able to make tools of our own.
A phone holds the knowledge of countless people.
A car stands on top of a vast industrial system.
A software product may carry the professional work of hundreds or thousands of people.
Ordinary people can use these things, but they can rarely change them, let alone build a new one from scratch.
Tools kept getting more powerful, and they kept drifting further away from the people who used them.
AI may be changing this
The change AI brings today may be about more than "getting work done faster."
The bigger change is this:
a great deal of the knowledge humanity has built up is becoming much easier for any one person to draw on.
It used to be that if you wanted to make a piece of software, you had to learn to program.
To make a website, you had to learn web development.
To work with a lot of data, you had to learn databases and data analysis.
To design a complex system, you needed expertise from many different fields.
That knowledge was always there.
It was just far away from most people.
AI hasn't made that knowledge go away.
For the first time, it has made a large part of it reachable.
You may not know how to write code, but you can describe what you want to build.
You may not know how a database should be designed, but you can talk it through with an AI.
You may not know every design tool, but you can make your own first version and keep improving it.
That's a little different from buying ready-made software.
Before, it was mostly:
I go find a tool that fits me.
Now another possibility is opening up:
I can try to make a tool that fits me.
It starts with apps
One small change we can already see is that more and more people are making their own apps.
Making an app used to mean a team:
a product manager, a designer, programmers, testers...
Now one person with AI can build a simple product.
It may not be perfect.
It may even be rough.
But it can serve the needs of just one person.
That's actually quite interesting.
Because for the first time in a long while, one person is starting to have a little of
the ability to make their own tools.
It's also one of the things we find most interesting in building Woodlogos, 16words, and the Makers Brain we're exploring now.
We don't only want to use ready-made software.
Sometimes we'd rather find out:
if this tool doesn't exist, can we make one ourselves?
Next, perhaps, hardware
If AI today is mainly helping us win back part of the ability to make software, the next step may happen in hardware.
Smart manufacturing, 3D printing, robots, automated equipment, and all kinds of modules that keep getting easier to buy will keep lowering the barrier to making physical tools.
Someday a person might describe what they need:
I need a device that can do this particular job.
AI helps with the design.
Machines help with the making.
Software runs it.
And in the end, a tool that truly belongs to that one person gets made.
It may not be a standard product sold to everyone.
It only has to fit this one person.
That's a very different logic from the industrial age.
The industrial age aimed for:
one tool that serves many people.
What may come back is:
one person who can make a tool that serves only them.
That day isn't fully here yet.
But the direction is starting to show.
Technology seems to swing back and forth
Looking back, human development may not simply move from one era to the next.
Often a new technology doesn't replace everything outright. It brings back some ability we had lost.
Farming gave people a steady way to produce food, and it also brought a new division of labor.
Industry let us make tools at scale, and it also concentrated the making of tools in fewer hands.
The internet made knowledge easier to spread than ever, yet much complex knowledge still sat with institutions and professionals.
And now AI is making part of that knowledge easy to approach again.
So we sometimes feel that:
technology seems to swing back and forth between concentration and dispersal.
Capability gets concentrated first, so that more complex systems can be built.
Then a new technology comes along and hands part of that capability back to more people.
That may be one of the more interesting sides of technological progress.
It doesn't only make machines stronger.
Sometimes it also gives people back abilities they once lost.
From using tools to making them
Perhaps the most interesting change ahead isn't that everyone becomes a programmer, an engineer, or a manufacturing expert.
It's that:
ordinary people can take part in making tools more and more naturally.
You don't need to master all the knowledge behind a tool.
Just as today we don't need to know every part of an engine to drive a car.
In the future, we may not need to be software engineers to create our own software.
Or mechanical engineers to build our own devices.
AI, smart manufacturing, and robots will increasingly stand in the middle, turning complex professional knowledge into abilities ordinary people can use.
Seen this way, the tools of the future may not just be things we buy and use.
More and more, they may also become
things we define, make, and use for ourselves.
And that may be one of the changes most worth watching in the age of AI.
Not machines doing more things for us.
But us, at last, being able to make some tools of our own again.