On September 30, in The New Yorker, Becca Rothfeld reported from the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington. Among the objections she encountered were concerns about what AI might diminish even if it worked as intended. The people she spoke with kept asking what education, creative work, and human relationships are for. Her report closes on that question, what a human life is for, and on a warning: if AI frees our time only so that we can use more AI, the result is “a kind of Ponzi scheme that bottoms out in nothing.”
In A Thousand Kisses Deep in Otherness, I wrote about being a girl in a library in Brčko, thinking alongside minds whose worlds were larger than mine. I did not read to have less thinking to do. I read because the encounter made more thinking possible.
When the library began answering, I recognized something of that experience. The difference mattered too. A book does not respond when I object, ask me to clarify, or change the direction of the conversation. With AI, I could bring something back.
This is the possibility I want to keep open when reading the humanist objection. A person may enter an encounter with artificial intelligence and leave with more of herself available: a connection recognized, an assumption examined, a thought she can now articulate and take further.
Perhaps, her own capability could be amplified through the encounter. But the girl in that library had already read. Owen Yingling, a philosophy student Rothfeld interviewed at the University of Chicago, described the difference from the other side: his parents love what AI can do because they “have already become the person that they are.” For his generation, which has not yet “become anyone,” it feels like an existential threat.
It is also possible to leave pleased and unchanged. An agreeable answer can feel like understanding. Fluency can conceal the absence of a challenge.
That uncertainty is where the inquiry should begin.
In When the Machine Builds Cities of Sand, I asked what happens to people while we measure the models. The question includes loss, dependence, and the surrender of judgment. It must also make room for growth whose shape we do not yet know.
I share the wish to protect a human life rich in attention, creativity, and connection. I also want to understand the encounters through which that life might expand. Refusal and adoption each leave that work unfinished. Rothfeld writes that the existing categories will not suffice and that a new vocabulary is required.
Perhaps that is the deeper gap: our technical language has grown far more precise than our language for what makes a human life full.
Last Thursday, these pages brought together researchers asking whether AI changes the person using it. The next question is what kind of change becomes possible, and what the person contributes to it.
So, what would help us recognize an encounter that enlarges our capacity to think, and distinguish it from one that merely makes us feel understood?
Sources. Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker · A Thousand Kisses Deep in Otherness · When the Machine Builds Cities of Sand