Losing My Humanity

Photo by Taruna Goel (Vancouver Art Gallery)

With AI tools helping us write most types of text including emails, letters, meeting notes, essays, articles, book chapters, etc. we are gaining a lot of help and saving some precious time. But what are we losing in the process?

I have been writing my blog since 2008. I haven't yet ventured into AI-supported blog posts and I don't think I want to. As much as our writing and speaking skills are about language, they are also about understanding our feelings and finding ways to deal with the feelings, and reflecting on them.

Writing blog posts allows me to analyze and synthesize information and use critical thinking skills to present my point of view. I strive to be unique, creative, and authentic, reflecting my true voice in my blog posts. If I stop making these kinds of efforts in the areas that I feel passionately about - learning & performance, I know it will be detrimental. I know for certain that an over-reliance on AI will lead to a deterioration of these skills and abilities over time.

But I am also concerned about what I am reading and consuming. If all I see is AI-generated content in my feed, will I still be able to connect with others, empathize with their perspectives, and build meaningful connections?

I ask myself, yet again, what is it that makes us human? 

I thought it was about language, about creative expression and imagination, about reflection and empathy, and about building connections. But what is human and what is AI; who am I building connections with? If I am gaining something, what am I losing in the process...

“It is customary to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.”

—Alan Turing, 1951

“The human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.”

—Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), 1995