Homo Techne fire may have helped early humans develop language, as they could sit around the fire and communicate with one another in a way that wasn’t possible before. All of these changes would have impacted early humans’ cog- nitive abilities, as they were now able to think about and engage with the world in new ways. My definition of Homo techne assumes that every individual human, sapiens or ante-sapiens, with or without an AI copilot, makes choices. Those choices, in the aggregate, shape what is experienced by each succeeding generation. To be clear, those choices are fraught—ours now, but also since the beginning of humanity. Every change had winners and losers. Life got more complicated for humans living in the Olduvai Gorge. The taming of fire involved a lot of death and disaster. The larger sapien brain killed women in child- birth. All three—stone, fire, and brain—enabled great new weapons that humans used, among other things, to hurt and kill other humans. If the ante-sapiens had been able to talk about it, might things have gone differently? Today, since we have sapiens brains, the internet, and also GPT, maybe we can actually bring more intentionality to these kinds of choices than Lucy and her ante-sapiens had available to them. And yet, despite evidence that for millions of years, the use and development of tools has amplified and accelerated the evolu- tion of our cognitive and social abilities, we still tend to view technology as a dehumanizing force instead of the thing that makes us, us. 201