What Makes a Human, Human?
Dear Friends,
One of my favorite authors, Yuval Noah Harari, said in a recent interview that he may never write another book. Why? Because AI has become so good at writing.
I felt a real sense of sadness hearing that.
Recently on LinkedIn, a friend posted something along the lines of: “I’m too busy this month, so my AI will be writing a daily post for me.”
My immediate reaction was: Why would I care what your AI has to say?
I unfollowed her. And I wondered how many other people were having AI write their posts.
Social Media & AI
I am still waiting for the social media company that finds a way to ban AI.
Shouldn’t we have some place where we can trust there is a human communicating with us?
This does not mean that everything written by AI is bad.
Recent studies suggest that when choosing the best of two paragraphs (one by AI and one by a human), people often unknowingly choose the AI. Oops!
Is it AI or Human … And Do I Really Care?
I do at times use AI to check my grammar, and find it useful. (though clean grammar alone makes a good article, not.) Let’s see an AI that would write that last sentence!
But what happens to human communication in an age of AI? (and when AI can do it better?)
Possibly—just possibly—because the human element becomes so precious, we will be forced to bring more of it into how we live and communicate.
After all, who wants to hang out with the smartest person in a room, anyway? There is more to any connection.
Maybe AI forces us to be less pedantic and more vulnerable; less know-it-all and more curious; less robotic and more messy and real.
What makes us, as humans, special isn’t that we know everything. It’s that we feel, sense, and intuit.
AI can (potentially) remind us of what makes us human, not take it away. After all, love has always been a more powerful force than intelligence.
Blessings,
SOREN
Our next in person event, the Wisdom & AI Summit, is May 13th + 14th in San Francisco.
About 250 tickets have been taken so far. We have extended Early Bird for a few more days.
You can learn more on the website … and see the current speakers and topics.
I have been using AI not to help me think or write FOR me but to amplify my work. Whether its editing and publishing my podcast episodes, brainstorming and outlining new ideas and creating a structure where I then use my own words to write or help me assimilate and teach pages of information that would have taken me weeks if not months to go through. Unlike social media’s spread - where we had no control until the harm was done, in this case we DO have control over how AI is trained and applied. The genie is out of the bottle. The question now is: do we build seatbelts, or do we wait until the crash?
I’m building what I call you had called a “seatbelt for the AI era” in the healing space - an AI companion trained to be anti-addictive, consent-based, and designed to restore what makes us human (our capacity to feel, pause, and trust our own knowing) rather than replace it.
Early signal from our pilot: when AI stops performing authority and starts creating space for us to listen to our body’s own intelligence, something fundamentally different becomes possible.
We each need to play our part, as you said. I’d rather be ahead of this - understanding its power, shaping how it’s used, than caught off guard watching it harm the people I care about.
Thank you for holding this question. It matters. I’ll be joining you at the summit virtually from Mumbai!
I am an author. I have four published books and many unpublished but shared with my students only. For lots of reasons (long story, every one) I have the rights to all my books. So recently I decided that all my published books (published around the turn of this century) and some of my unpublished ones needed good edit. I did the re-writing on each (a tedious job) then I ran each chapter through Claude.ai to look for typos, grammar issues, punctuation errors, formatting consistency, and other phrase errors I may have missed. It was fabulous. Claude found errors that my human editors and proofreaders had missed back in the day! Does proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, and consistent wording matter in a spiritual book? Maybe not. But it matters to me. Now all my books are available in print-on-demand format, as well as digital. (Claude helped me format for those platforms as well as helping me create new book covers.) It took me about six hours, for example, to edit, format, build a cover for, and upload my longest and "favoritest" book. It would have taken a month for me to search out every nuance, and I still would have missed plenty. That's my reason for liking AI as a writer's assistant. The text and concepts are mine -- the language meticulousness is Claude's.