# On being human in a world of machines

July 29 2026.

We spend so much time rushing through life that sometimes we forget to notice it.
Maybe it’s time to slow down and appreciate the way the light hits a window, or the sound of the subway passing by.

I say this as someone who studies AI and spends most days watching machines get better at intellectual work.
The progress is unbelievable and while thrilling, the more you think about it the scarier it is.
My friends' opinions are equally divided in what i can best describe as "worried psychosis".
My conversations keep circling back to the pragmatic take that AI, while dangerous, has a lot of opportunity, and is unstoppable (unless *maybe* for [coordinated government intervention](https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/)), but also that we are in a unique position to make the best of it (we as in humanity and we as in curious ad driven computer scientists).
Without turning this into a motivational speech- I think it's the most important work of our time to make sure this all goes well.

I often come back to a [quote](https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1710462485411561808) by Ilya Sutskever in 2023: “If you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time.” (he is a wizard btw, what foresight..).
We are learning to reproduce *some* parts of thought at astonishing speed - imitating intelligence - while remaining almost completely ignorant about the part that feels.
It is uniquely beautiful that we're here, small beings in a big world, and we should appreciate this more, especially if that "intelligent" part becomes abundant.

Houda Nait El Barj has a similar line of thought in [*What Becomes Valuable When Intelligence Is Cheap?*](https://houdanait.substack.com/p/what-becomes-valuable-when-intelligence): “When intelligence is cheap, resonance becomes expensive.” By resonance, I think she means the sense that something has reached you rather than merely passed before your eyes. A machine can produce an image in seconds; an artist might need days. But the human artifact has a story with it and the humanity to it can make it resonate more.

Dario Amodei writes in his famous [*Machines of Loving Grace*](https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace) that “meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor.” People still play chess, badly (some more than others) and happily, though computers surpassed us a long time ago.

This is only comforting up to a point. Life can be meaningful and precarious at the same time. Chess is a game. However, the economic incentives that underlie our civilization are (in the short to medium term) may reward some rather drastic moves and shifts in the labor force and in *work* as we know it - this is rather unsettling, but at least we're all in the same boat!
Except we're not..
AI may erase work people depend on while its rewards concentrate and collect somewhere else.
In the limit, it is imaginable that everyone can prosper, but it is also imaginable that power will be more unevenly divided than ever.

I doubt anyone else knows how this will unfold or what kind of economic model is viable in a post-AGI/ASI world.

## More connected, more alone

It is estimated that [six billion people are now online](https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-11-17-Facts-and-Figures.aspx), and [social isolation and loneliness are widespread](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978240112360).
It's an odd world we're in, in which reaching another person has never been easier and at the same time feeling reached can still be painfully rare.

I am worried that AI could deepen this loneliness by giving us frictionless substitutes for company.
At the same time, AI could also give us more reasons to value human-ness.
If machines take over more and more, perhaps they can return some of our attention to the people in front of us?

Oddly, AI may make us more human, or at least force us to decide what we mean by that.
As intelligence becomes abundant, human intimacy becomes more precious.

## The human experience

As AI continues to hillclimb, my attention keeps drifting towards consciousness, an ambiguous term.
I'm completely out of my expertise here, but I want to lay out some thoughts, and I believe we don't have to be philosophers to think about what these things mean for ourselves, I think it's really important to engage with such "meta-questions" on a personal level.

We can watch an AI model solve a difficult problem, and we can even in limited capacity use methods to tell whether anything wakes up inside it while the answer is being formed.
For example, recent research on a [J-space](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html) allows verbalization of internal representations (but not subjective experience!).
Some of the factors we would typically attribute to consciousness seem to be emergent in AI, things like having a working memory, higher-order "meta" thoughts, the ability to perceive its environment and contextualize, etc.
People say the models just *imitate* thinking, *imitate* intelligence, *imitate* etc.. - but is there a difference?
At the same time, it seems truly far fetched to think that it can "feel" anything, but then again, we cannot properly explain this in our own selves either.
Perhaps one has to be [alive to be conscious](https://www.noemamag.com/only-what-is-alive-can-be-conscious/)?

Some theories describe consciousness as information broadcast across the brain, while others look for a system capable of representing itself.
In any case, thinking that there's more to it that makes us *us* is a nice thought, regardless of if its true or not.

Thomas Nagel asked [what it's like to be a bat](https://philpapers.org/rec/NAGWII) and concluded that while we could learn every fact about echolocation and how a bat acts, we still can't know what it's like for a bat to be a bat.
David Chalmers, in search of a fundamental theory of consciousness, called *experience* a [hard problem](https://consc.net/papers/facing.html), because an "account of what the brain does" doesn't explain subjective experience.

Maybe intimacy begins at this limit. Each of us is "enclosed" within a point of view that nobody else can fully enter, and we spend much of our lives trying to close that distance with the people close to us. Another person cannot feel *exactly* what I feel - at least not from the same experience standpoint - but they can come close such that we feel connected (cf. *soulmate*).

I try to find peace in not knowing these answers.
The next few years will be chaotic, and I'm excited for the future.

In my opinion, we should all become more curious and attentive to the life happening around ourselves.
Pay attention to fellow humans, and the small things in life!
Find your [ikigai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai).

~Tobi