Staying human

There's never been a more important time to embrace what makes us innately human, especially in our art

In my day job—the work for which I get paid (at least for now)—I spend most of each day talking and thinking about AI.

Specifically, I’m involved in discussions about how to make the AI work better, how to design software products that are “AI-native,” and how to get our teams to use AI to work more efficiently and intelligently in their day-to-day work.

I also talk about AI in my private chats with co-workers. But mostly, these discussions revolve around:

• Why AI can never truly replace us—but how we fear our employers will replace us anyway.

• How everything’s moving so fast we simply can’t keep up with it all, and aren’t sure we even want to.

• How all the human imperfection of business life is causing siloes, games of telephone, fear, defensiveness, old-world thinking, moving too fast or slow.

• Our kids, parents, friends, time in nature, wonderful vacations, crazy analog hobbies we’re developing. (Shout out to my colleagues learning to eat fire and training to cycle 100 miles around Lake Tahoe!)

• Our feelings. Sad, happy, angry, annoyed, tired, scared, relieved it’s Friday, grateful for each other, hopeful for good things.

While the world is pushing us to embrace AI as the way to work, the things we truly, privately care about are human. The problems in business are created by humans—imperfect, messy, well-intentioned, mood-driven humans. We react and make decisions based not just on data and inputs, but on feelings and instinct, which are inherently human.

It’s ludicrous when I find myself constantly defending our human roles in the value chain. We get context. We have empathy. They can’t do this without us! Yet, I’ve also been around Silicon Valley for 25+ years, and I know the truth: company leaders and investors prioritize speed, efficiency, and profit over people.

We’re not here for people. We’re here to build cool shit, faster, and sell it to someone who needs it, or will need it once we convince them that they need it. (Never mind that those buyers happen to be human. They’ll adjust.)

The inherent problem, one that futurists and ethicists are starting to ponder, is what happens to humanity when AI begins to disrupt the natural way humans build ideas, interact with each other, and build societies. As an essay from the Center for Humane Technology puts it:

Our relationships influence how we think. Our thinking impacts our work. Our work builds our identity. Our identity shapes our inner world. And our inner world informs how we relate to others. When one pillar is weakened by AI, the others strain. When several are undermined at once, we risk the foundations of a meaningful life crumbling.

The human moments that refresh us

The sycophant-like gushing over AI is having the opposite of the intended effect on me. Instead of jumping on the train—er, the light-speed starship, because trains are so 1800s—I’m emotionally opting out. I’m focusing my mental energy on small, complicated problems that take time and heart to solve. I’m talking with my colleagues more—listening, processing feelings, encouraging them to take care of themselves.

Though I love working remotely full-time, I’ve also recently discovered the phenomenon of spending time with other people. Ultimately, it exhausts me—because neurodivergent introvert here!—but it also lights me up. Each time I’ve gotten to spend a few days with my leadership team at work, I walk away feeling grateful for them, energized, and trusting of my team.

Part of this, I think, is that I get to know them as humans. In the in-between moments of the week—the car rides to and from the office, the coffee breaks, drinks in the hotel bar at night—I learn about one colleague’s teenager, someone’s childhood, another’s sick mother, the screenplay my colleague is secretly writing at night.

These experiences give me a boost, to want to get up the next morning and “do more AI.” Because I want to do it with them, the humans I care about.

To make art is to be human

I’ve been thinking about all of this as it pertains to writing. The AI phantom is looming in the publishing industry too. Everyone’s holding up the examples of how AI is infiltrating authors’ territory. Publishers are printing AI-written books. Some agents and editors are (supposedly) using AI to review manuscripts. Everyone’s scared and pissed off. Of course, this is all happening at a time when the publishing industry itself is at a crossroads. There’s more supply and less demand than ever before. Profits are at stake—because at the end of the day, the industry isn’t about art, it’s about business.

Enter efficiency, speed, predictability. Put the formula into the machine, and spit out a sure thing on the other end in fifteen minutes. Done and done.

Except that, again, humans are the consumers in this equation. And as human authors, we’re all trying—slowly, messily, uncertainly, incrementally—to write about the human experience. Humans writing for other humans, trying to find meaning one word, sentence, and page at a time. Trying to connect with each other by finding new, fresh ways to convey that meaning.

I love how Andy Horwitz writes about this in his essay “In Praise of Inefficiency”:

The cult of efficiency is predicated on the conviction that the merely human is insufficient. But there is something extraordinary in the merely human and messy, the slow, unproductive, inefficient processes of experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, deliberation — the way our multiple intelligences and imaginations, when directed towards a shared problem or set of ideas, can come up with multiple possible interpretations and outcomes, and through the collaborative process of juxtaposition, editing and re-assembling, create something novel and surprising and, frequently, enlightening. Art is a way of thinking and being in the world that requires great swaths of seemingly ‘unproductive’ time. As Miles Davis once said, ‘Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.’ And behind every technology is a human being, usually many of them working together, who brought a previously unseen world into existence. It seems likely that inefficiency is a feature, not a bug, in the operating system of human experience and so has inherent value.

A quiet revolution

My private rebellion against this anti-human movement is to try to be as human as humanly possible. As someone who has always pushed my brain and body to work like a machine, now I move more slowly and deliberately. I do one thing at a time. Take breaks. Take walks. Pet my dog. Listen to birds. Rest when I need to. Read print books. Cook and eat food slowly. Spend quiet time with people I love. Knit and sew. Honor what my body needs. Drink water. Seek joy.

The irony is that my whole career took off in the 90s because I jumped on the internet bandwagon and never looked back. But now, that story makes me a dinosaur—the internet is old news! Every time a colleague shows up demonstrating something they built in Claude Code, or reveals how they generated something in 15 minutes that used to take weeks, I mentally surrender. I’m never going to catch up, and I don’t want to.

I want to keep coming back to humanity. Do my art with perseverance, discovering what my brain can conjure and connect without asking a large language model to solve the problem for me. Write as a human for other humans. Humanity is what we uniquely have. I’ll keep claiming it and owning it. AI can have everything else.