Hamlet's Take on Artificial Intelligence

By Andrea Malmberg

In Hamlet, Shakespeare gives us one of the most quoted lines in the English language:

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

The line is often interpreted as an argument for relativism, as though Hamlet was suggesting that reality itself is merely a matter of opinion. In my Catholic high school, where many of my teachers were Liberation Theologians and who were personally impacted by the covert U.S. wars in Central America in the 80s, I learned to interpret it a different way. Hamlet is wrestling with his own view of his world, Denmark, and how markedly different others seem to view the relationships, perceptions, and consequences while sharing the same circumstances.

Four hundred and fifty-some years later, we still seem drawn to the idea that every new development must be categorized as either salvation or catastrophe. Artificial intelligence is only the latest example. (In full disclosure, I used AI to confirm my memory of the quote since I haven’t read the hard-cover book for over 40 years)!

Depending on who you ask, AI is either the most important democratizing technology since the printing press or the beginning of the end of human creativity and autonomy. It is either a revolutionary force for good or a dangerous force for harm. As Hamlet might remind us, reality is rarely so tidy.

One of the reasons I continue to find Holistic Management relevant is that as practitioners, we embrace complexity; it calls us to grapple with paradox. The framework does not ask whether something is inherently good or bad. It asks us to consider our holistic context. Under what conditions does any given action or inaction move us toward or away from what we truly need?

The Energy/Money Source and Use check is particularly useful for assessing one's use of AI. It asks whether the energy or money supporting an action comes from an appropriate source and whether its use aligns with our holistic context. More importantly, it requires us to notice patterns of dependency before they become addictions.

When I apply that lens to AI, I find myself holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

The first is that the concerns are real. AI depends upon vast amounts of electricity, water, minerals, infrastructure, and capital. The ecological costs are not imaginary, nor are the risks associated with concentrating so much technological power and wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of highly influential tech bros.

The second is that AI may prove to be one of the most significant expansions of access to knowledge in human history. For most of our existence, information has been scarce, expensive, and closely held. Literacy itself was once restricted to a small portion of society. Books were rare and painstakingly produced. Universities served a privileged few. Legal expertise resided largely with lawyers, scientific knowledge with scientists, publishing with publishers, and influence with those who had access to the institutions that mediated information and authority. Over centuries, a series of innovations steadily widened that circle. The printing press made ideas reproducible. Public education expanded literacy and libraries created public access to accumulated knowledge. The internet made information broadly available, even if not always easy to navigate. Each development was met with both enthusiasm and fear because each shifted existing power structures. And it must be noted that in much of our world, access to learning and communicating remains highly regulated, especially for women.

AI feels different in scale, but perhaps not in kind. What appears to be changing now is not merely access to information, but access to the capacity to engage with it. So, AI appears poised to alter the equation yet again, not by creating new knowledge, but by dramatically lowering the barriers to engaging with, organizing, synthesizing, and applying the knowledge that already exists.

Living in a rural community, I understand this reality firsthand. Distance from population centers often means distance from expertise. If you need legal analysis, specialized research, or professional guidance, access can be constrained by geography, cost, or institutional barriers. Today I can sit at my table and explore legal questions, analyze financial scenarios, investigate scientific literature, challenge my own assumptions, and organize complex ideas in ways that would have been difficult or prohibitively expensive only a few years ago.

I am recognizing the visceral empowerment I feel through AI. It is making me more efficient, productive, and more importantly, thoughtful. Often plagued by self-doubt, perfectionism, and thus procrastination, I now have a personal assistant, an editor, and an executive assistant that, if in human form, would be financially out of reach and actually might not be as capable of looking at all of my journals, publications, legal and financial documents, and spreadsheets. My human creativity is unleashed!

Being unleashed, however, does not absolve me of the need to acknowledge AI's ecological costs, nor require me to embrace the technology uncritically. It simply asks me to hold both truths long enough to ask more useful questions.

In Holistic Management, when we evaluate any action, we eventually arrive at the question of 'Energy/Money Source and Use.' Where is the energy coming from? Where is the money coming from? What pattern of dependence or capacity is being created through their use?

Applied to AI, I find myself less interested in whether the technology is intelligent than in what it does to human creativity. Among all the tools available to us—technology, fire, living organisms (grazing and animal impact), rest – we must have money and labor, and human creativity. Yet unlike money and labor, human creativity is the only one that consistently increases as it is exercised. Human creativity is not consumed through use. It expands. It is the source from which enterprises emerge, institutions are built, problems are solved, and entirely new possibilities are imagined. Every form of wealth ultimately begins there.

This is what makes AI so fascinating and, perhaps, so consequential. Could it be that AI is one of the first technologies that appears capable of either diminishing or expanding human creativity, depending entirely on how it is used? If it becomes a substitute for thinking, questioning, observing, learning, and relating, it risks becoming the very sort of dependency the Energy/Money Source and Use check warns us to avoid. We may gradually surrender capacities that should remain distinctly human.

If, however, it enables more people to participate in inquiry, problem-solving, and the generation of new ideas, then we may be witnessing something quite different: the conversion of energy into expanded human creativity. If AI is capable of amplifying human creativity, then the question that most interests me is not whether the technology is good or bad, but whether we have enough wisdom – the “thinking that makes it so” – to direct that creativity toward outcomes worth creating.

Human history can be viewed, in part, as a series of responses to constraints. At different times, our lives have been shaped by limitations of land, energy, labor, capital, mobility, and access to knowledge. Entire economic systems, governments, religions, and educational institutions emerged in response to those limitations, helping societies organize around what was difficult to obtain, distribute, or understand.

What if we are entering a period in which access to information is no longer the primary constraint?

If that is true, then the weak link shifts. The challenge becomes less about acquiring knowledge and more about developing the capacity to use it well. Not wisdom as an abstract ideal, but as the practical ability to be curious, recognize patterns, understand context, anticipate consequences, and align our actions with a future we genuinely desire.

In Holistic Management, we do not begin with choosing a tool. We begin with the holistic context. What do we want our quality of life to be? What forms of life, livelihood, community, and landscape are we trying to create that will last far, far, into the future? Only then do we ask whether a particular tool moves us toward or away from that future.

Viewed through that lens, AI is simply another technological tool, albeit one with extraordinary reach. What captures my attention is not the technology itself, but what becomes possible when millions of people gain access to capabilities that, until recently, were concentrated within institutions, professions, and centers of power. More questions can be explored. New connections can be made, and ways of participation become possible. Most importantly, new ideas can emerge from people who previously lacked the resources, credentials, proximity, or influence required to enter the conversation.

The ecological implications belong within that same inquiry. The data centers that support AI require immense amounts of energy, water, materials, and infrastructure. That reality is not a footnote; it is part of the reality–indeed, to play off of Marcellus in Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” I mean AI. Yet human creativity has always revealed itself most clearly when confronted with genuine constraints. The challenge is not simply to power AI, but to ask what kind of energy, water, and economic systems we want its existence to inspire. I don’t personally believe, as Haration responded: “Heaven will direct it.” People must, as Homo prospectus.

The idea of Homo Prospectus posits that humans are defined not by wisdom (Homo sapiens) but by their unique ability to anticipate and evaluate future possibilities (Homo prospectus). Collectively, could we demand computation-accelerated investment in distributed solar generation, long-duration storage, or entirely new approaches to energy production? Could waste heat become a productive asset rather than a liability, supporting food production, manufacturing, or community infrastructure? Could we grow crops on top of these monstrosities, with forests all around, to mitigate sound pollution? Could data centers evolve from isolated industrial facilities into integrated components of regional economies, creating ecological, social, and economic value simultaneously? Could the same intelligence being directed toward generating answers also help us better understand and manage the Ecosystem upon which all wealth ultimately depends?

These questions strike me as far more useful than debating whether AI should exist. The printing press did not eliminate the need for judgment. Public education did not eliminate the need for discernment. The internet did not eliminate the need for wisdom. Each expanded access to knowledge while increasing the importance of our ability to use it responsibly. AI appears likely to continue that pattern.

What remains unchanged is the central role of human creativity. Information, no matter how abundant, creates little value on its own. Value emerges when people observe, imagine, experiment, collaborate, and act. It emerges when knowledge is transformed into insight and insight into the stewardship of relationships.

Perhaps that is the real opportunity before us: the possibility that expanded access to knowledge might unleash human creativity at a scale we have not previously experienced. If that happens, the most important question is what kind of future we choose to create with it.