Being human among thinking machines
Learning to live inside the collapse of certainty
I'm largely optimistic about technology. But the anxiety of humanity losing our essence lingers in the back of my mind through each waking hour.
A few years ago during my Saturn Return, I searched the internet for meaning and inspiration which manifested through a Keynote speech of perhaps one of the greatest minds in Technology.
Technology, as someone who didn't come from tech, seemed largely about codes and capital in an island far away from what my intellect could comprehend. I didn't like it, I didn't care. But this conversation was gripping, the storytelling pulled me in — Artificial Intelligence was the catalyst for human imagination and the path to unprecedented abundance.
My early enthusiasm glossed over the enormous energy costs and computational demands of AI, a naivety I've since corrected even if it complicated my optimism. But I'm driven by the question haunting all of us today: what does it mean to be human in a world where the machines grow more capable, more present, more like us?
"We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean, we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge."
Steve Jobs
It's no mystery that we're constructed by the world around us; the institutions, expectations, culture and narratives that form our sense of self. These parameters we once clung to — those neat boxes of self that promised a level of certainty and coherence — seem to be challenged in the presence of machines that think, create, and increasingly mirror our own cognitive patterns back at us.
For generations, we've tied our identities to our jobs under the tenets of capitalism. I believe the shift we will witness in the next decade is AI slowly dissolving societal focus on economic growth to perhaps human well-being, giving us a chance to redefine human purpose beyond work.
Somewhere in the middle of this 21st century burnout, our nervous systems have stopped regulating normally, our identities are overshadowed by superficiality, the crippling anxiety of being productive and neglecting rest have turned us into zombies in constant survival mode.
Maybe AI could represent the change needed to dismantle a system that demonstrably fails to serve our interests, as humans.
Like everything in nature, we are shaped by change — sometimes gently and sometimes violently, but always in service of becoming. And like water, we might need to learn to take the shape of the moment, fluid enough to adapt while maintaining our fundamental nature.
As the machines redefine work for us, does the question then shift from 'what do you do?' to 'who are you when you're no longer doing?' Can our identities exist independent of our productivity?
I feel this collapse of certainty and see the chaos play out in extremely polarising opinions about AI and the future, and rightfully so. It's uncomfortable. But perhaps within this discomfort lies something unexpected: the possibility that we might create new forms of belonging, new formations of the self that don't depend on old hierarchies and systems.
"If we start teaching children at age six that they don't need to excel in school merely to secure a job, but rather to explore what ignites their passion, it would create a vastly different formative experience for their developing brains compared to initiating this conversation at age 40."
Vinod Khosla — AI: Dystopia or Utopia
If we teach children at the age of six to explore, imagine, discover and experiment, will they then be guided by an entirely different sense of self than their predecessors? Will they be guided by a built-in intelligence system — our intuition — that isn't buried beneath layers of productivity culture and perpetual distraction?
"There's a big difference between a factory job where you command the robot and one where you are the robot."
Naval Ravikant
For decades, we've been the robots — optimizing ourselves for efficiency, measuring our worth in productivity metrics, treating our minds like machines that should run at peak performance from morning until night.
I'm seduced by the hope of moving from survival states of paying bills and 40-hour work weeks to perhaps the most important element in sustaining our humanness: hobbies. And in so many ways, when productivity is boosted by our AI agents that overwhelmingly reduce our cognitive load, perhaps our minds can participate in acts of wonder and unlock actual creativity.
In pursuit of my own act of wonder, I'd like to bring the reader along in exploring AI's most exciting and provocative frontiers while keeping humanity at the centre of the conversation through published essays.
I believe we're standing at an interesting intersection in human history where old systems and beliefs are collapsing, and together we can proactively create new ones. It's exciting when you're being handed a blank canvas — at least that's how I look at it. And I believe the next societal infrastructure can be reinvented with more human agency at its core.
Thank you for reading.