What Does It Mean to be Human Now?

The existential fear we all feel around artificial intelligence is the one I have seen the fewest people write about. The conversation in public is mostly the panic of economic repercussion, which is real. Occasionally a voice rises about the mental weather of it, which is also real.

But the question I keep returning to, late at night, is neither of these. It is the older one, the quieter one: What does it mean to be human now?

Two schools have laid the intellectual foundation of the modern West, and it is worth naming them plainly. Descartes gave it a sentence that carried it for four centuries: cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. And capitalism, which prescribed, at its core, that the human must produce. These two have tangoed for centuries, mesmerising many into playing the game. To think was to be. To produce was to matter. A life that did both was a life that counted. A life lauded, and prosperous. It was a life that masked obedience to the systems as a life filled with purpose.

So what happens now, when a machine can think clearly enough to produce?

As rhetorical as the question may feel, it isn't. A tango needs two partners, and one of them has just handed its steps to something else. An else that does not sleep, does not doubt. It does not talk back unless explicitly asked to, and does not require the rituals by which a human being reminds itself it is alive. It has, by all intents and purposes, opened a widening gap in how we measure our worth against a system that conditioned us to locate that worth solely in thinking capability and production efficiency.

Alas, the West is now standing in front of the realisation, and the realisation is not small. If thinking does not make us, and producing does not make us, then what does? Do we even remember what that's like after centuries of conditioning? After so many centuries spent dismantling the older foundations that held up human consciousness, the ones our grandmothers' traditions kept quietly in trust while we were elsewhere, a harder question arrives.

Can we revisit them, and ask for forgiveness?

I do not know what the next sentence of this story will be. I am not sure one sentence will do. But I notice that the people I know who seem steadiest in this moment are not the ones with the cleverest theories about artificial intelligence. They are the ones whose sense of themselves never rested on the tango in the first place. Or at least, discovered a self beyond the boundaries the tango drew around them.

A machine can think. It can produce. The machine cannot, as far as anyone has shown, sit with another being in a way that changes the weather in the room.

Perhaps that was always what made us. Perhaps we only forgot because the music we tangoed to was purposefully made loud.

So what now when the music finally, just abruptly, stops?