What does it mean to be human?

I have a friend who enjoys accusing me of being a Luddite. I’ve always shrugged off the accusation as a joke, but it’s lately begun to sting, smacking more and more of patronizing insult and less and less of a well-meaning ribbing. His reason for the epithet? My extreme caution in thinking about humans’ future alongside all of our digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence.

I am thoughtful about how I use technology. I have an Apple iPhone, but I don’t have social media apps on the phone. I use LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook for specific, targeted purposes like planning and advertising events. I actively avoid Twitter, leave my phone at home whenever possible, and rarely watch television. These behaviors are not isolationist, rebellious acts. I like my smartphone. I enjoy watching movies. My house is a smart home connected to Siri and Apple HomeKit. I use ChatGPT for a variety of purposes: writing and automating scripts for complicated spreadsheets, generating code blocks, and summarizing ideas. I use Claude to code. I was an early adopter of Midjourney in 2022 and have used it extensively for both professional and personal purposes. However, what I’ve tried to do is build a rigorous conceptual framework for how I want to interact with technology, and, let’s just say, I’ve found the optimum interaction with all these tools to be minimal.

By scientists’ best guess, our modern species of Homo sapiens emerged in Africa 300,000 years ago. But, as Noah Yuval Harari points out in Sapiens, we didn’t function as we do now until the “Consciousness Revolution” about 10,000 years ago, when history as we know it as well as our understanding and recognition of ourselves began to take shape.

Since we began classifying ourselves and all other living things into genus and species, we settled upon calling ourselves “wise men” or Homo sapiens. In other words, it’s our intelligence above all else that has been our self-referential defining point. Artificial intelligence feels so world-bending (and to others, world ending) because it threatens the human view of self. If our intelligence is what makes us human, what does it mean if something supersedes it?

You need not look far for proponents of the idea that our intelligence is what gives humans value. I recently read Wolf Tivy’s essay in Palladium Magazine (Make Yourself Human Again), and his ultimate conclusion is that the twin combination of agency and intelligence is what defines our humanity. Whether machine intelligence eclipses and potentially extinguishes the human race, he writes, we should strive to maximize our intelligence and agency:

Don’t worry about the long term destiny of man, but wax your own will to power and become the unsafe superintelligence that you fear to see in the world, even if in your own small domain…

This has the ring of hollowness to it. Don’t worry about the long term destiny of man? Sounds more like an insult to my intelligence than a solution. Clearly Tivy is writing for a very specific audience, one that is probably highly educated, future-oriented, and well-off. I imagine a plumber reading Tivy’s conclusion and thinking, “I’m now going to be an unsafe superintelligence. Right after I fix this overflowing toilet.”

“Even in your small domain”, he adds, throwing a bone to the vast majority of humanity that lacks the resources, connections, or spare time of Tivy and his ilk. I find his ultimate conclusion bankrupt and weak, a last-ditch-effort argument, something you might offer to a drowning man at sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by Great White sharks, telling him, “Maximize your will to live! By grabbing onto this piece of driftwood.” Both noble and futile.

If our intelligence really is the source of our value, then the really brave thing, it seems to me, is to accept our fate. We must joke like Eugene Ionesco, “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel so well myself.” But has death finally come for the human race?

My problem with Tivy’s logic is that he accepts the premise that our value as humans is our intelligence. His solution to the oncoming evolution of sapiens to machina is to maximize the intelligence that will quickly be eclipsed by AI. It reminds me of my comically short high school football career: I was 5’9”, 170 lbs, and a sophomore starter on the varsity team as an outside linebacker. Just as the season began, Brooks, a senior from another school, transferred to my small, private high school. I can’t remember whether that was his first or last name, but it didn’t matter: Brooks was 6’2”, 200 lbs. of pure muscle, a jawline that would make Brad Pitt blush in envy, and a ferocity that felt more animal than human. More importantly, Brooks played outside linebacker. ßBy Tivy’s logic, I could have tried to become the ‘unsafe super outside linebacker I fear to see in the world’ to fight the inevitable replacement, but that was a losing battle. The good news was that being an outside linebacker on a second rate team at a second tier high school wasn’t my identity. Naturally, I got replaced. Better yet, I adapted and eventually moved on to other things.

Maybe it’s time we stop trying to define our humanity by our intelligence alone. Maybe AI is the reckoning we’ve been waiting 10,000 years for, the catalyst for us to think more deeply as a society about what really makes us human. Maybe the real evolution that needs to occur is in our philosophy.

The friend mentioned earlier texted me a few weeks ago in the midst of an argument about the utility of AI and its influence on human future:

The best generative use cases are augmentative. Instead of the Inklings gathering at the Eagle to go over each other’s drafts and refine them slowly, the AInklings can have a personalized editing companion to pair and work with.”

I must admit, ‘AInkling’ is a witty, attractive turn-of-phrase (the kind of thing I wish I would have thought of), but there’s a number of assumptions in the above remarks that make me balk. First, that the primary goal of the Inklings was output, an assumption that their desire was to produce as much as possible as quickly as possible. Second, that the point of their gathering was primarily to refine their works. And, third, that the creative process itself is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

Why did the Inklings gather at The Eagle and Child? It was a place where unfinished worlds were constructed and unfinished words read aloud for critique and feedback: Workshopping their writing was what they did, but it isn’t why they gathered. Tolkien, recalling those meetings in later years, wrote that they were ‘a feast of reason and flow of soul’. In other words, the connection to the other humans is what gave the gathering value. If the true intention was just output, there would have been several better ways to accomplish this. Drinking with a group of middle-aged men twice a week seems sub-optimal for churning out literary works.

An anecdote from C.S. Lewis may be instructive. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace, the erstwhile and cantankerous main character, meets a star who takes the form of an old wizened man named Ramandu. Eustace is offended. “In our world,” he says, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world,” responds Ramandu, “that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

Humans are made of matter and a complex network of neurons that define our intelligence, but what are we? And what, therefore, does it mean to be human? The example of the Inklings points to an answer.

The first is that engaging in the creative process is a human characteristic. An AI doesn’t have a process in the human sense — it predicts, synthesizes, collates, and rearranges — but it doesn’t struggle. There is no hardship in its effort to produce something. The human experience is typified by pain and suffering, and the human creative process, in particular, involves difficulty. The paradox, something missed by those who are obsessed with ‘optimization’ and ‘output’, is that we derive meaning from these struggles. My first short story is unquestionably bad, and no doubt ChatGPT could have written something much better in far less time, but I wouldn’t trade the hours of writing and thinking it took to get there.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that the point of human existence is hardship. I’m also don’t glorify pain. What I am promoting is the fulfillment and meaning we find along a creative journey. I’m not disposed to believe that a creative journey needs to be analog to have value; digital tools can be used to achieve similar outcomes. What I am saying is that the human experience is typified by conflict – the conflict of the writer with what Steven Pressfield calls ‘the Resistance’; the conflict of the gymnast with manipulating her body to master a complicated routine on the uneven bars; the conflict of the amateur runner completing their first marathon; the conflict of overcoming our own immediate desires to achieve something lasting; the conflict inherent in any worthwhile friendship that makes it more meaningful when weathered.

From an AI’s perspective, this struggle is sub-optimal. To borrow a cliché to make a point—for machina the destination is all that matters. but for sapiens it’s the journey to get there.

This brings us to the second part of what makes us human. Humanity is relational. I don’t just mean social. Lots of mammals are social. My dog is social. People even tell me reptiles are social. We are instead relational.

I was first exposed to this idea in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s book Introduction to Christianity, a thorough analysis that draws heavily on physics. Ratzinger makes the argument in the middle of the book that relationality, like substance, is a ‘primordial form of being’. In other words, there is a physics of relationships, you might call it a metaphysics, that governs human interaction with other humans just like there is a material physics that governs human interaction with the substantive world. If this doesn’t make sense to you, then I recommend trying a simple experiment. Approach a stranger on the street and tell him he’s ugly. You will quickly discover the relational corollary to Newton’s Third Law.

As I’ve been thinking deeply about my own humanity in the age of Artificial Intelligence, these two characteristics continue to surface. My own involvement in creating things both fulfills me and lends meaning to my life. Part of that fulfillment comes from the difficulty inherent in the nature of creation. The ‘product’ or ‘output’ isn’t the whole story. The creative process is often slow, and it cannot be ‘optimized’ to achieve the transformation I desire within myself.

I have also paid more attention to my relationships. These have dimensions that are known but not quantifiable, full of complex emotions and calculations and interactions. Like the creative process, I have found significant meaning and fulfillment in proximate, intimate relationships with my fellow humans. To double down on being human, find ways to spend more quality time with other human beings.

Creativity and relationality are not incidental characteristics. They are fundamental characteristics. Even before ChatGPT burst into the world, driving investors mad with frenzy and everyone else mad with ignorance and fear, we were already losing our humanity. This isn’t an AI problem – it’s a human problem. In the first temptation of Man by Machine, we failed. We ate the bread of digital convenience, believing we would never be hungry again. Instead we’re shells of our former selves: adults are lonelier and less fulfilled and children are reeling from mental illnesses en masse, but we don’t need to compound falsehoods: artificial intelligence will not save us. Having failed our first test, let’s not fling ourselves off the tower expecting to be caught by the better angels of our nature. Or those of Artificial Intelligence.

Is your imagined future essentially human, or not?

To answer Yes to that question is to step into the blast radius of the pejorative grenades technologists like Nick Land lob about monkey socialism. But, if he’s right, then we are preventing the next iteration of evolution; we are an accident on the evolutionary timeline that became self-aware and in our consciousness developed hubris, thinking ourselves too important to be eclipsed. To answer “Yes, the future should be human-centric” therefore is to perpetuate stupidity, thus proving ourselves unworthy of the small level of intelligence we have attained.

To answer No brings with it unintended consequences for our present. Through this techno-evolutionary worldview, the advancement of history is nothing more than a phenomenon to which we have assigned arbitrary meaning. It is useful only insofar as it advances technology and the next phase of evolution — a superior Machina sapiens to the Homo sapiens of the last 10,000 years. But if the answer is “No, the future need not be human-centric”, then all of our causes and small steps towards equality and freer societies is equally useless and meaningless, except in one context—freer, organized societies are useful means to specialization, and specialization to economic development, and economic development, ultimately, to the advent of the Machina sapiens and whatever comes after that.

Of course, to de-center humans, even for a moment, even to achieve some superior future, immediately de-elevates humanity and its associated systems as merely means to an end, and as means to ends, what can’t be justified? The cries of humanists will be nothing more than ethical caution tape—temporary, and easily swept aside.

Yes, AI will radically change our future. But we have the choice to believe a narrative about our future and its use that is either fundamentally human or not.

We worked for years to de-center God and center humans. Now things have come full circle: we are de-centering humans in favor of a God of our own making.