The real constraint on human creativity isn't talent—it's time and autonomy.

There's a popular narrative that AI is more creative than humans. I understand why. Ask ChatGPT for a poem, and it delivers instantly. Request code, and it produces working solutions. But we're confusing knowledge accumulation with genuine creativity. More importantly, we're misdiagnosing why so few humans appear creative. There are so few successful artists and entrepreneurs it appears that being creative is an exceptional human trait, not something everyone has.

The Walmart Paradox

We say there are few good artists and entrepreneurs. But that's not because people lack creativity. It's because they lack time to be creative.

The person stacking boxes at Walmart—are they inherently less creative than the celebrated Manhattan artist? I don't think so. They lack what Daniel Pink identified as the three pillars of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

When Google gave engineers 20% time, they created Gmail and Google News. When companies implement Results-Only Work Environments, creative output measurably increases. The constraint isn't biological. It's structural.

Adam Smith Saw This Coming

In 1776, Adam Smith wrote:

"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."

Smith compared farmers who face new problems daily with factory workers repeating motions. The farmer stays creative. The factory worker's mind atrophies.

Modern neuroscience proves him right. A 2024 Norwegian study found workers in repetitive jobs had 66% higher risk of cognitive impairment. Brain scans show the damage: reduced gray matter, decreased flexibility, altered dopamine function. Division of labor reshapes our brains.

AI's Real Advantage

What AI has isn't creativity—it's accumulated knowledge.

My experience building with AI confirms what researchers find: these systems excel when you know what to build. "Implement a React component with these features"—perfect. "Explain quantum mechanics"—excellent. They synthesize vast information instantly.

But I constantly guide them because they lack perspective. They don't have what Alan Kay called the most valuable asset in problem-solving which is outlook.

"Point of View is Worth 80 IQ Points"

Alan Kay understood something profound. Raw intelligence has diminishing returns without the right conceptual framework. His team at Xerox PARC didn't make incremental improvements—they reconceptualized what computers could be.

Current AI lacks this ability to shift perspective. It can optimize within paradigms but can't create new ones. It paints in any style it knows but can't invent Impressionism. It writes code in any pattern but can't conceive object-oriented programming.

Outlook develops through lived experience, through struggle, through being in the world. It's not about intelligence. It's about perspective.

Leonardo Couldn't Build a Car

Leonardo da Vinci was arguably more intelligent than Henry Ford. His notebooks reveal understanding of flight, hydraulics, and mechanics centuries ahead. Yet Leonardo couldn't create a working engine.

Intelligence can't transcend accumulated knowledge. Leonardo's helicopter designs were brilliant but unbuildable with 15th-century metallurgy. Research shows over 100 of his "inventions" had ancient prototypes—his genius lay in recombination.

Henry Ford, 400 years later, had centuries of engineering knowledge available. Internal combustion, precision manufacturing, metallurgy—developed by thousands over generations. Ford synthesized available technologies into something transformative. He borrowed from watchmakers, gun manufacturers, slaughterhouses.

This is what AI does: it turns everyone into a Henry Ford. It allows people of varying intelligence access to vasts amount of knowledge which AI can assist in synthesizing. This will contribute significantly to innovation but not invention. Invention requires new perspectives. New by definition is something unseen before. Einstein is a great example of someone who re-conceptualized the way we think about our reality.

The Missing Pieces

Current LLMs have fundamental limitations preventing genuine creativity:

No Persistent State: Every conversation starts fresh. Imagine Picasso forgetting his Blue Period every morning.

No Online Learning: They can't learn from experience. Research shows this "catastrophic forgetting" problem gets worse with larger models.

No Internal Reward System: Humans create from internal drive—curiosity, aesthetic pleasure, flow state. LLMs optimize external metrics but feel no satisfaction.

No Embodied Experience: We understand "heavy" metaphors because we've lifted things. LLMs process symbols without sensorimotor grounding.

These aren't minor technical hurdles. They're fundamental to human creativity. We need a new paradigm away from LLMs.

Wasted Human Potential

The saddest part of "AI is more creative" narratives: they obscure millions of humans with untapped potential.

History's full of late bloomers. Grandma Moses started painting at 78. Bill Traylor began drawing at 83 while homeless. The pattern: creative breakthroughs come after achieving economic security or freedom from survival pressures.

Pierre Bourdieu's research shows how class determines whose creativity gets developed. Economic constraints cascade: no materials, no time, no networks, no cultural validation.

We mistake systemic constraints for individual limitations, then marvel at AI's "creativity" when it's really accessible knowledge.

The Future

I'm not anti-AI. These tools democratize knowledge like the printing press democratized information. But just as printing didn't eliminate human thought, AI won't replace human creativity. AI is to intelligence as airplanes are to flight. Airplanes fly faster than birds, but certainly can't land on a tree branch. You can't say airplanes are better than birds. It really depends on what you mean by better.

The potential lies in combination. AI handles mechanics—syntax, boilerplate, patterns. Humans provide perspective, meaning, innovation. AI makes everyone Henry Ford, but we still need Leonardo da Vincis.

Research confirms this. AI tools increase creative productivity 25% and output value 50%. But improvements come from reducing friction, not replacing insight. AI helps execution. Humans provide vision.

What This Means

We're at an inflection point. We can use AI to concentrate creative work among the privileged while automating everyone else into cognitive atrophy. Or we can unlock human potential at unprecedented scale.

Imagine that Walmart worker with AI tools and autonomy to use them. Imagine economic security not being prerequisite for artistic expression. Imagine systems enhancing rather than replacing perspective.

The question isn't whether AI is more creative than humans. It's whether we'll use AI to unlock creativity that's always been there, waiting in every human mind for the right conditions.

What most people lack isn't creative ability or intelligence. It's not even knowledge anymore. It's what they've always lacked: time, autonomy, and space to develop their unique perspective.

That's not a technological problem. It's a human one. And only human creativity can solve it.