We didn't build AI because we were bored. AI grew naturally after the complexity of vast amounts of data broke the human scale.

There’s a lot of dramatic language swirling around artificial intelligence right now.

Current mood: The sky is falling. The robots are coming. Half of white-collar America is doomed.

But what if AI isn’t a radical leap forward so much as a rational response to something that was already happening?

What if AI isn’t the cause of disruption — but the answer to a problem created by the Information Age?

We have layered so much law, research, regulation, documentation, analysis, and institutional memory onto our civilization that no single human mind — or even a team of human minds — can meaningfully hold it anymore.

AI isn’t a technological indulgence.

It’s a coping mechanism.

Let’s take two fields of study for example: Taxes and medicine.

The Tax Code Problem

The U.S. tax code is not just “complicated.” It is structurally unmanageable. When you include statutes, Treasury regulations, administrative rulings, case law, and guidance, you are looking at tens of thousands of pages.

Even experts disagree.

There have been repeated audits and studies showing that identical tax information submitted to multiple professional preparers can produce materially different results. 

But all for the same reason: Professional interpretation diverges significantly under complexity.

That’s not because accountants are incompetent. It’s because no one holds the entire system in their head.

The U.S. tax code has grown beyond human-scale cognition.

In this context, AI isn’t replacing expertise. It’s extending it. 

AI can cross-reference thousands of provisions instantly, surface obscure interactions, and synthesize case law in seconds.

Not because it’s smarter than humans, but because it can process scale.

The Medical Fragmentation Problem

We live in an era of astonishing medical advancement. But that advancement has come at a cost: hyper-specialization.

You don’t just “go to the doctor.”

You see a cardiologist.
 An endocrinologist.
 A gastroenterologist.
 A neurologist.
 A rheumatologist.

Each one is highly trained. Each one sees a piece of the system. But the human body does not respect departmental boundaries.

Hormones affect mood.
Autoimmune disorders affect neurology.
Cardiovascular health intersects with metabolic dysfunction.

But the more knowledge expands, the narrower the lens becomes. This isn’t a moral failure of physicians. It’s a structural reality of such exponential information growth.

AI’s value isn’t that it “thinks like a doctor.”

It’s that it can scan millions of papers across disciplines, detect patterns across specialties, and integrate research that no single human has time to read.

Again — not because doctors are failing, but because the information load is no longer human-sized.

The Information Explosion

The Information Age did something extraordinary.

It democratized knowledge. It digitized centuries of human thought. It made global archives instantly accessible.

But in doing so, it created a paradox: access expanded faster than comprehension.

Law is no longer a handful of precedents. Finance is no longer a ledger and a quarterly report. Geopolitics is no longer a cable and a handshake.

Everything is cross-referenced with everything else.

We didn’t build AI because we wanted a flashy chatbot.

We built AI because human cognition evolved for tribes of 150 people and oral storytelling — not for parsing petabytes of cross-linked legal, medical, financial, and historical data.

In this context, AI is not unnatural. On the contrary.

It is the logical extension of a civilization that digitized itself.

Reframing the Fear

When AI is framed as a hostile invention, the debate becomes emotional.

When it’s framed as an answer to runaway complexity, the debate becomes structural.

The real question isn’t: “Will AI replace us?”

It’s: “What else could we have done with systems so complex that we can’t navigate them without assistance?”

The tax code is incomprehensible.
Healthcare is fragmented.
Regulatory regimes sprawl across thousands of pages.
Financial markets operate at speeds no human can process.

AI didn’t create any of that. It arrived because the alternative was paralysis.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)