Essence of Humanity
When philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti came up with this question in the 1980s, AI technology as we now know it was just a vague ambition. Still, he was able to sense the advent of an unprecedented crisis at the root of human identity, experience, and meaning. In a world where systems would tell people how to live, diagnose better than any doctor can, translate books, compose poems and Beethoven-like symphonies, and produce unparalleled philosophies, what would there be left for the human mind to be and do? Krishnamurti was quick to realize what’s at stake: the conversation about AI should not be only about what the machine is and should be but also about what the human is and should be.
The AI Mirror
We look at this challenge not only as a crisis to handle and overcome but also as an opportunity to embrace. More than a technological breakthrough, machines simulating human thinking and creativity can serve us like mirrors.
When we look at the AI mirror, what is reflected back is both all that can be programmed in us – and all that could never be programmed yet has too often been neglected and forgotten. Approached wisely, AI could help us better understand and appreciate the fullness of who we are and what we can be. Ultimately, it may urge us to rediscover our most essential human powers and capacities.
The Missing Creative Response
Our commitment is to reframe the AI age as an opportunity to get closer to our deeper humanity. This is what we take to be a proactive response to humanlike machines: tapping into all that is not machinelike about us. Instead of just trying to protect critical thinking and intellectual agency, we aspire to introduce people to the range of capacities that only a conscious being can possess.
‘Capacities’ are more than skills and competences, a domain AI can easily access. They involve the whole range of experience available to us. They are enduring powers and potentials through which we come into contact with the world. We should get to know them better, access and cultivate them, or they might atrophy and wither. They must remain palpably alive if we hope to lead a meaningful human life under these new conditions. This is what we are here for: offering you a well-researched and practical approach to the awakening of human depth.
AI comes closer to us than other automation. It touches our mind, it touches our emotions. It imitates emotions, and because it appears as a social conversation partner, it more directly affects our inner life. The image we have of ourselves will unavoidably be influenced by what these systems reflect back — and there is a danger that we become only what the machine mirror shows us.
