Paul Bunyan, AI, and the Crisis of Imagination

The legend of Paul Bunyan starts where ordinary human capability stops. He was born in Maine — some versions say it took five storks to deliver him — and together with his blue ox Babe he rearranged the American landscape. He didn’t cut down trees. He cleared forests in a single swing. He didn’t navigate rivers. He straightened the crooked ones and dug new ones with his axe. The Great Lakes were Babe’s footprints, filled with water. The Grand Canyon happened because Paul dragged his axe behind him on a walk.

If you read the Paul Bunyan stories carefully, you notice they’re not really about logging. They’re about what happens to a person when their capability suddenly jumps past the previously possible. And specifically: whether their imagination can keep up.

This is exactly the question generative AI puts in front of us, and almost no one is asking it out loud.

AI has handed everyone an enormous axe. A task that used to take a skilled professional hours now takes minutes. A creative project that used to need a team can be roughed out by one person. Code that required years of expertise can be scaffolded by someone who’s been programming for a month. Writing, analysis, design, research — entire categories of work that used to be bottlenecks have opened up.

The interesting thing about Paul Bunyan, though, is what he didn’t do with his strength. He didn’t use it to do normal-sized logging more efficiently. He didn’t optimize the cutting of regular trees. He didn’t streamline conventional operations and take longer lunches. His capability demanded — and his imagination supplied — proportionally bigger problems. He thought at the scale of geography, not forestry. The tool prompted bigger dreams.

What are we doing with our axe? Mostly we are using it to write the same emails faster. To produce the same reports with less friction. To automate the same workflows. The whole conversation around AI right now is dominated by a phrase that should make us nervous: “more with less.” Same outputs, smaller team. It’s Paul Bunyan using his giant strength to cut down regular-sized trees really, really quickly, and then taking longer lunch breaks.

So the question I keep coming back to is: where’s our Grand Canyon?

Where are the projects no one could have conceived of attempting before? Where are the things that require this new capability just to imagine, let alone execute? The bottleneck has moved. It used to be: can we afford to build this? Now it’s: can we imagine what to build? But we seem to be failing the second part. The problem isn’t a poverty of tools. It’s a poverty of ambition.

This is strange when you think about it. Why, given more power, do we dream smaller dreams?

I think part of the answer is that imagination is a muscle, and ours has atrophied. For decades we were trained by constraints. We learned what was feasible within a budget, a timeline, a headcount. We learned to be “realistic.” We learned to scope things down. Those habits made sense when they matched reality. The problem is, reality moved and the habits didn’t. We’re like someone who wore a weighted vest for years and still walks with a cautious gait long after taking it off.

There’s a worse possibility, though, which is that efficiency has quietly become an end in itself. Corporate culture, productivity culture, the whole genre of optimization — they all taught us to value doing the same things with less waste. That was a sensible thing to optimize for when resources were the binding constraint. But when AI removes that constraint, the optimization reflex stays. We keep measuring success by time saved and costs cut. We’ve gotten so fixated on the denominator that we’ve forgotten about the numerator. We’ve forgotten to ask whether the thing we’re being efficient about is large enough to matter.

The Paul Bunyan stories endured because they captured something specific about American imagination at a specific moment — a belief that expanded capability should lead to expanded horizons. That bigger tools required bigger dreams. The stories were absurd. That was the point. They modeled an imagination that scaled with capability.

What would “more with more” actually look like?

It would look like one person attempting projects that used to require an institution. It would look like using AI not to write the same old reports faster but to synthesize across domains no single human could ever traverse alone. It would look like teaching students subjects we couldn’t previously afford to teach — personalized, adaptive, patient. It would look like artists exploring forms that were structurally impossible in purely human collaboration. It would look like researchers asking the questions that used to be off-limits because the synthesis required was too large.

If we don’t do this, the tragedy is going to be specific and avoidable. The tragedy will be that given Paul Bunyan’s axe, we used it to make normal-sized woodpiles slightly faster. That an unprecedented amplification of human capability led not to a new age of ambitious creation but to a slightly more efficient version of what we were doing already. That our tools became extraordinary while our imaginations stayed conventionally sized.

The Paul Bunyan story was never really about strength. It was about ambition that scaled with strength. That’s the part worth inheriting.

The real test of this moment isn’t whether AI will make us more productive. It already has. The test is whether it will make us more imaginative. Whether we’ll dream bigger, or just complete smaller dreams faster. Whether we’ll dig a Grand Canyon, or just clear the same forest by lunchtime.

We’ve got the axe. The question is what we think it’s for.