AI Won’t Replace Human Creativity. It Will Unleash It.

Between roughly 7500 and 5600 BCE, thousands of people lived at a settlement called Çatalhöyük in what is now Turkey. Although often described as an early city, it has little in common with urban places we know: there are no streets, no doors, no clear marketplaces, no public buildings, and only one location that seems to have had a religious use. Archaeologists continue to debate why these features are missing, but one particularly parsimonious explanation stands out: many, perhaps all of them, simply had not been invented.

The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük lacked neither intelligence nor creativity. They produced murals, developed trade networks, and domesticated animals. But they lived within a technological and cultural horizon that constrained what could be built and sustained. Some ideas may never have occurred to them; others may have been imaginable but unrealizable given the limits of materials, geography, institutions, or coordination.