From Prometheus to Generative AI
On Making Fire and Making Thinking
There is a puzzle in the archaeological record that has always fascinated me.
The earliest evidence for human use of fire dates to around 1.2 million years ago. Charred bones, heated stone, ash deposits, the traces of early Homo erectus sitting beside flames, warming themselves, perhaps cooking. For a long time this was taken as the origin point of humanity’s relationship with fire. These early humans, however, were almost certainly not making fire. They were using it, maintaining flames that lightning strikes or wildfires had already provided, keeping them alive, moving them from place to place.
The ability to make fire, to produce flame on demand from nothing but the materials at hand, appears much later, around 400,000 years ago, possibly more recently. The gap is one of the most important distinctions in the history of human cognition.
We tend to tell the story of Prometheus as a cautionary tale. The Titan who stole fire from the gods, punished with eternal torment, chained to a rock, his liver eaten daily by an eagle. The moral we draw is about hubris: the danger of overreaching, of taking what belongs to the divine.
But the fire Prometheus steals is not ordinary fire. According to Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright, widely regarded as the father of tragedy, it is techne, the capacity for craft, for making, for the transformation of raw material into something shaped by human intention. What Prometheus gives humanity is agency: the ability to act on the world rather than merely respond to it.
The gods were right to be threatened. The capacity to make fire changes what kind of creature the human being is. Before fire-making, humans were dependent on the environment’s provision. After it, they carried a capability inside themselves. They could generate warmth and light when they needed it.
This is the gift worth thinking about. The making, not the flame.
To make fire by friction, using a bow drill or hand drill, requires a precise combination of materials, a specific technique, sustained physical effort, and the ability to read subtle signals: the colour and texture of the dust produced, the smell, the moment when an ember is forming. It requires a form of embodied knowledge that cannot be reduced to a proposition. You cannot make fire by friction simply by knowing the theory. You have to have done it, failed at it, adjusted, tried again. The knowledge lives in the hands as much as the mind.
The archaeologist Lambros Malafouris, whose work on the relationship between material culture and cognition has reshaped how we think about human evolution, has argued that this kind of making, what he calls material engagement, is not merely the expression of pre-existing cognitive capacities. It is constitutive of them. The human mind did not first develop certain capabilities and then use them to make fire. The making and the cognitive development co-evolved. The brain that could make fire was partly shaped by the activity of making it.
The capacity for fire-making was therefore inseparable from the process of acquiring it. The early humans who learned to make fire built the skill slowly, through the particular history of their attempts and failures. In building it, they became different kinds of creatures, with richer internal models of causality and deeper capacity for planning. Agency, in other words, is something you develop through the particular history of your attempts to exercise it.
The gap between 1.2 million and 400,000 years ago is, in this light, the gap between receiving a capability from the environment and generating it from inside yourself.
Anil Seth, the neuroscientist and author of Being You, a landmark study of consciousness and how the brain constructs its experience of reality, describes what he calls counterfactual depth: the capacity to model not just the present state of the world but the range of possible futures that different actions might produce. Systems with counterfactual depth can imagine how things might be otherwise, holding open the question of which path to take rather than simply responding to the most immediate stimulus.
Fire-making requires and develops this capacity. To make fire, you must anticipate what has not yet happened, imagining the ember before it exists, adjusting your technique based on a future state you are trying to produce. You must hold in mind simultaneously what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve, navigating the gap through sustained, responsive action.
This capacity, to act in service of a not-yet-existing state, underlies planning, creativity, and the ability to learn from failure. It is built through effortful, embodied engagement. And it is, in the deepest sense, what agency consists of: the ability to bring about a state of affairs that would not have existed without your particular effort.
The question is which other activities are worth protecting from substitution. Habits of care are as essential as the original act of making: carrying fire when you travel, organising the night watch so it never flickers out, and feeding it through the small hours.
An early analogy offered in defence of AI tools was the calculator. We no longer ask students to perform long division by hand because calculators do it faster and more accurately, and the cognitive capacity long division was building is no longer necessary in a world where calculation is universally available. AI writing tools are the natural next step: why struggle to articulate an argument when a language model can articulate it for you?
The calculator analogy is incomplete in a number of ways, and the fire analogy helps to clarify one of them.
Long division is a procedure that produces a result. Once a tool can produce the result more reliably than the human, the procedure becomes optional.
Writing is something else. Of course, much writing is performative, bureaucratic, or simply empty. Some writing is, bluntly, bullshit. That is not the type of writing this essay considers.
To articulate an argument in writing, to externalise it, is to discover what you think in the process of trying to say it. The labour of articulation is generative of thought, and ultimately of the self that does the thinking.
To outsource that labour is to outsource the development of the very agency that makes genuine thinking possible. It is more like outsourcing fire-making to someone who will always provide a flame when you need one. The warmth is real. The light is real. The capacity that would have developed through the making does not develop. You remain dependent on provision, and dependence on provision is precisely the condition that Prometheus sought to end.
The fire-making builds something the flame alone cannot provide.
Prometheus was punished for giving humanity the capacity to make fire. The gods understood that it was not the warmth that threatened them. It was the self-sufficiency. A humanity that could generate its own light and heat needed the gods less. It had acquired, in the deepest sense, its own agency.
This framing is not new. Plutarch, reflecting on education in the first century, wrote the following in On Listening to Lectures (De audiendo):
Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.