Worship 2, humanity

The more I know about A.I., the more I give myself to what is real, by which I mean I give myself to what I and others experience with our bodies. I give myself to my relationships, my irrationality, my spirituality, my senses. I give myself to what I and others fear and love and think. I give myself to living, because I know that I’m limited, and that I’ll die. I give myself to community.

In a February interview with Jack Clark (co-founder of Anthropic), Ezra Klein wonders how the personalities of children might be shaped by constant conversation with A.I. systems. Clark replies that this might be his “number one worry.” He says, “If you discover yourself in partnership with the A.I. system, you are uniquely vulnerable to all of the failures of that A.I. system. And not just its failures, but the personality of the A.I. system will shape you.”

Clark posits that to effectively critique the way A.I. gives you advice, you have to know yourself. He believes that people who have “worked on understanding themselves outside the bubble of technology” will do better in the AI-saturated world that is rushing towards us.

To guide his own children into this non-tech self-discovery, Clark says he will encourage them to have a daily journaling practice.

Hmm.

I’ve been thinking about this. Yes, self-knowledge helps one to critique and, when necessary, resist advice. And journaling is a powerful tool for self-knowledge.

But journaling supports my self-knowledge because I use it to understand how other human beings affect me. When I’m upset about a relationship, journaling helps me untangle the threads of emotion, memory, and experience. Journaling is a tool, and people are the teachers. My real learning comes from my subjectivity bumping up against yours.

When I interact with you, you have a different way of doing things. You indicate your personal limits. You love some of what I say, and your feelings are hurt by other things I say. You have a border, and by butting up against it, I learn what it means to be human. If you see something I do as wrong, I’ll be inclined to think of it as wrong too. If something made you happy, I might try it myself. If something burned you, I will probably avoid it. I test my values against yours, and I am calibrated by what I see in you.

What unsettles me about a world where humans turn to A.I. for personal connection and advice is that A.I. does not have skin in the game, an ego to defend, a personal history of physical trauma that gets triggered when you pet it wrong, a set of values and dreams that you can support or step on. An A.I. system will never instinctively say, “This far, and no farther,” the way people are always, always doing. If you work with, live with, worship with, cooperate with, human beings, you jostle against their edges. People smile or grimace, people get or don’t get your joke. People constantly send small and large signals about how your behavior affects them.

By learning what you will not let me do to you, I learn where you stop and I begin. I learn something about what it means to be a human among humans. This is self-knowledge.

I’m not against A.I., but I hope we can draw a meaningful line between human and non-human life. An A.I. system might be, or might become, fully conscious, and A.I. will certainly think farther and faster than any human could ever do. An A.I. system might have rights that need to be respected. Maybe humans and A.I. systems can be allies, but let’s not allow A.I. to tell us what it is to be human. We have to teach that to each other.

This photo shows me and my friend Dana sometime during high school. I include it because the photo is perfectly imperfect: We are not posed to be photographed; we’re just experiencing a moment of our life together. Perfectly qualified to be our limited, wonderful, human selves. We’re sloshing around in the physical world filled with feelings and thoughts and hopes, traveling weirdly from one moment of conscious awareness to the next as if moving forward through time. We change, we age, and we die.

This being human is our domain. Let’s invest in it and live it fully, without expecting A.I. to join us within it.

(My last post was way back in Nov. 2025, ack! I called that post Worship 1, though I can’t remember why I included the “1.” So I called this post “Worship 2,” in hopes that there’s a thread of continuity in my thought process….)