“AI companies are taking advantage of our natural tendency to ascribe an inner life to our interlocutors. They profit when you think the chatbot cares.” — Kate O’Neill
If we don’t like someone, we call them a fascist. And if we like them, we say they are a humanist. The F and H words. Both meaningless in our sloppy, bot-infested age. But maybe I’m just a cranky anti-humanist. Even anti-human — whatever that means.
Or maybe I’m being harsh (moi?). Humanism certainly is all the rage in our AI age. Corporate consultant Kate O’Neill likes the word so much that she has built her brand around it. The self-styled “Tech Humanist” is the author of Tech Humanist, the host of the Tech Humanist Show, and a frequent speaker on the TED circuit.
So how to use the H word without sounding like Claude or ChatGPT? O’Neill argues that what makes us human is our quest for meaning. The M word. That’s what distinguishes us from the bots. But as Kazuo Ishiguro warns in Klara and the Sun, we are fast arriving at a point when the bots are better than us at extracting meaning from the world.
So did Kate O’Neill pass the Keen Test (reverse of Turing)? Did the Tech Humanist say anything that would have eluded Claude? Or have we already arrived at Ishiguro’s bleak terminus where the bots are more skilled at infusing the H word with meaning than we are?
