I can’t help seeing a connection between my favorite frozen yogurt and the future of civilization. In the 1980s, Penguin’s Frozen Yogurt was super-hot. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing their stores. Today, there are only three left.
Why are those three still open? All I can think of is that someone, somewhere, really wants to hold on to them. Which makes me ask: What is so dear to us that we want to hold on and never let go?
With technology driving us further and further away from our humanity, the future of civilization may well rest on this question: How far are we willing to go to hold on to the things that make us human?
Right now, we’re going at lightning speed in the other direction. The extraordinary force called Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens to replace us, seducing us with an irresistible sales pitch: Why do something yourself when a brainy, all-knowing program can do it all instantly and better?
AI is both an end and a beginning. It is the culmination of a digital age that has already sucked up much of our humanity through the virtual experience of digital screens. And now, in our weakened and vulnerable state, AI is trying to finish us off.
“It’s as though all the trends of the digital era have been building up to this consummation of its logic,” Ross Douthat writes in The New York Times in a must-read essay. “Every force I’ve just described is likely to become more intense the more AI remakes our lives. You can have far more substitution — digital workers for flesh-and-blood colleagues, ChatGPT summaries for original books, AI girlfriends and boyfriends and companions.
“You can have far more distraction — an endless stream of AI-generated content and entertainment and addictive slop from a ‘creator’ whose engine never tires. And you will absolutely have a stronger sense of human obsolescence or superfluity — economic and social, artistic and intellectual — if AI travels just a little bit farther along its current lines of advance.”
Against this avalanche of artificiality, do humans stand a chance?
Instead of giving you glib answers, I hope to kick off a conversation. This subject is so consequential it merits a series of essays from expert voices to help us grasp a revolution like no other.
Our aim will be to explore not just the dangers but the potential promise of AI.
To start with some food for thought, I came across this story by Michael Rosen on The Dispatch, about an 84-year-old woman in India who was on life support.
“Her husband, who is 92, was distraught,” Rosen writes, recounting something he had heard on a podcast. “He wanted to tell her how much she had meant to him, how wonderful their 60-plus years of life together had been. But he didn’t know how to say that in words. As it happens, his granddaughter works in AI. She guided her grandfather through some AI prompts, asked her grandfather some questions and entered them into ChatGPT.
“It produced a poem. A long poem. He said it perfectly captured his feelings about his wife. And that, on his own, he never would have been able to come up with the right words. He sat next to her, reading the poem, line by line. She died soon after. And he said it allows him to know he told her everything.”
Are there other AI stories like the one above that give us hope? Said another way, if we use AI correctly, can it make us more human?
I also came across this theoretical answer:
“AI has this strange paradox about it: the more it takes over the mechanical, repetitive, or even the ‘logical’ tasks, the more space it gives us to be creative, emotional, and … human. Here are a few ways to think about it:
“Emotional intelligence gets a spotlight. When machines can do the technical stuff better, our value as humans shifts to things like empathy, storytelling, connection, care — things AI can simulate but not feel. In that sense, AI reminds us what’s uniquely human.
“Creative freedom. AI can be a powerful tool in art, music, writing, and design. It doesn’t replace creativity — it often enhances it. You can sketch ideas faster, explore wild concepts, or collaborate with it like a muse. That process can feel very human and freeing.
“More time for meaning. If AI helps automate jobs or chores, we (in theory) get more time for family, passion projects, or introspection. The real challenge becomes: what do we do with that freedom?
“Forcing reflection. AI also pushes us to define what being human really means. Like — if a machine can write poetry or comfort someone, then what is consciousness? Emotion? Art? It makes us hold a mirror up to ourselves.”
I found those answers interesting but somewhat glib. Of course, they were written by ChatGPT, so maybe there was a self-serving bias. After all, what does AI know about being human and savoring delicious frozen yogurt with my kids?
To be continued.
