AI Will Change What It Is to Be Human. Are We Ready?
This technology can usher in an age of flourishing the likes of which we have never seen. It will also foment a crisis about what it is to be a person at all.
By Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit
Are we helping create the tools of our own obsolescence?
If that sounds like a question only a depressive or a stoner would ask, let us assure you: We are neither. We are early AI adopters.
We stand at the threshold of perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced. As AI systems increasingly match or exceed our cognitive abilities, we’re witnessing the twilight of human intellectual supremacy—a position we’ve held unchallenged for our entire existence. This transformation won’t arrive in some distant future; it’s unfolding now, reshaping not just our economy but our very understanding of what it means to be human beings.
We are not doomers; quite the opposite. One of us, Tyler, is a heavy user of this technology, and the other, Avital, is working at Anthropic (the company that makes Claude) to usher it into the world.
Both of us have an intense conviction that this technology can usher in an age of human flourishing the likes of which we have never seen before. But we are equally convinced that progress will usher in a crisis about what it is to be human at all.