Is AI a threat to your humanity?
Understandably, may people who are not immersed in AI as the greatest advance in their lifetimes are stressing about AI.
It’ll take our jobs. Isolate us. Make us stupid. Fight our wars. Control us.
And true, we can all point to examples where this has already happened, to some people, on some level. And yes, some of it may be inevitable, at some level. We call that “change.”
Your Decision
But whether you’re using AI to make your business more efficient, or using it to make your personal life more efficient and expansive, or are subject to how others may be using it in business and personal realms, you’re largely in control of how it impacts your humanity.
How AI ultimately affects your own humanity begins with an inflection point in your own Guiding Narrative®. When you imagine how the world works, do you envision yourself more a recipient of culture, or a contributor? Do you feel more that you inherit society or create society? In other words, are you a passive floater, or active swimmer, in the wave that is taking us as humans wherever it is we’re headed?
A tool
AI is a technology, a tool. To the extent that it will change how we create and manage other technologies, it’s advance is a reflection of its utility in driving evolution, much like the printing press, the steam engine, the Internet, and Labubus. Ok, not Labubus.
The printing press spread ideas, the steam engine enabled industrial production and mobility, the Internet facilitated far flung connection and collaboration. AI enables efficiency, reflection, and fantasy alike.
To the extent that you value technology-aided efficiency, reflection, and fantasy over everyday human interaction in different aspects of your life, you’ll gladly use AI. Where you prefer homespun humanity over AI-assisted efficiency, reflection, and fantasy, disregard it.
Choose. And if you don’t like how you experience how others use AI because it diminishes the human interaction you might have with them or their businesses, choose someone else, a different experience. (I know, you can’t always choose whether a bot is deciding whether you get a job interview or insurance coverage for a medical procedure, and there’s that deep fake thing, but that’s “change.” Adapt, and when you can, choose.)
Claim your humanity
Believe it or not, not everyone spends a lot of time online. Many prefer the vibration of a spruce top acoustic guitar to the raging blare of a Marshall amplifier. Some even still hand write letters and lick an envelope. Luddites? Or people getting great satisfaction from their everyday sense of humanity. Living their lives.
The tagline for AI, like for many technologies, should be “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” AI is here to stay and likely the attention it’s getting will be eclipsed by something new in the next 5-10 years, or sooner (quantum computing?). Decide where it will reside in your lived experience.
The bottom line: take control of your own humanity. Be the human you want to be. If everyone does that, the line where AI ends and humanity begins will be clear, certainly to you, and through cultural signaling, even to the most ardent of AI champions and purveyors.
