AI and Human
Author: Peter Kaminski Issue: 2025-05-21
AI and Human
by Peter Kaminski
As we come to terms with this new (and not so new) thing called “AI”, and after reading Ken’s thought-provoking piece elsewhere in this issue of the Plex, I wanted to share some reflections on “AI.”
As social animals, humans are particularly tuned to anthropomorphize pretty much everything.
Much of the way you think of anything you interact with is wrapped around the fact that your brain is exquisitely wired to play the game of being a social animal, constantly perceiving and judging other humans–and pretty much anything else–as an active object, an actor, a sub- or super-human, in a social game with you.
And so it has been with “AI”, that we other it, and personify it, and imagine it is separate from us, and has agency either for us or against us.
Yet this framing misses something fundamental: there is no meaningful separation between humans and our tools. AI isn’t acting on us or for us - it’s how we’re acting, through an increasingly sophisticated extension of human capability.
As others have started saying, I think of “AI” as a tool built by humans, and wielded by humans. (At least for a little while longer!)
The definition of “human” or “humanity” has been shifting ever since Home sapiens started making tools and using language–things that have let us step away from being strictly part of the natural world, into a new and wonderful/awful emergent of whatever “human” means today. I wonder sometimes, what our ancestors of a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years ago think of us. I think they would think of themselves as “humans” – but would they think of us the same way? We build, use, control, and are controlled, by our superpowers – electricity, vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, concentrated animal feeding operations, computers..., and now, AI.
AI for me isn’t an “other”, or a thing that has agency outside of the humans who wield it. It’s just humans, humaning–building bigger and more complicated pieces of technology, deploying that technology in a way that profoundly shapes other humans, and changes the world in good ways and bad.
Were we still human when we learned to control fire? When we turned to agriculture? When we invented cities and wars and war machines? When we merged our fortunes with task animals like dogs or horses? When we split the atom? When we invented credit scores, or mutual funds, or private equity firms? How about clearcutting, strip mining, colonialism, or slavery? I think we like to say, “yes”. I’m not sure our ancestors would agree.
But if we say, if we think, we’re still human after inventing all those things and more, and using them for good and evil, then AI–or more properly, the things that humans do with AI–is just another similar expansion of what it means to be human.
Or, maybe we stopped being “human” when we first let tools, fire, and language separate us from the natural world.
Welcome to being AI and human!
Author’s note: I wrote about 92% of this piece, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet about 8%. Claude helped me by writing this transition: “Yet this framing misses something fundamental: there is no meaningful separation between humans and our tools. AI isn’t acting on us or for us - it’s how we’re acting, through an increasingly sophisticated extension of human capability.” The rest was written by me. I take responsibility for publishing all of it. –Pete
Bonus link: I like Claude's writing better than ChatGPT's, so I gave Ken's prompt to Claude. Its poem is here.
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