From a February 2026 conversation between AlignIQ co-founders Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss about new Harvard Business Review research on AI and workload.
A book idea from decades ago that fits AI well: every tool that gives us new power also brings a new way to cause harm.
Key takeaways
- Every technology lets you do something you couldn’t do before. The axe lets you build.
- Every technology also has a downside. The same axe lets you clear your local forest.
- So each new technology creates a need for new norms. AI is no exception.
Try this with your team
Name one thing AI now lets your team do that it couldn’t before. What’s the “forest” version of that capability, and what norm would prevent it?
Going further
Ethical AI Guardrails is how we help teams write those norms down.
Sources mentioned
- James Burke and Robert Ornstein, The Axemaker’s Gift (1995)
- Harvard Business Review (February 2026): AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
There was a book I read back in high school called The Axemaker’s Gift.
“When high schoolers still read books?”
Yeah. By James Burke, I think. The whole point of the book is that with every technology, there’s some amazing thing it can do. With an axe, there are things you could do that you could never do before the axe was invented. But then there’s the other side of the coin. There’s always some downside to it. With the invention of the axe, you have the ability to chop down your local forest.
So with the invention of the technology, there is a need for new norms, essentially.