The approach.

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the question of what it means to be human has taken on renewed significance. As artificial intelligence continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, we find ourselves confronting fundamental questions about identity, consciousness, and purpose that philosophers have grappled with for millennia.

At its core, being human has traditionally been defined by a handful of distinguishing capacities. We reason. We create. We love. These three pillars have long served as the foundation upon which our understanding of humanity rests.

But this definition is increasingly under pressure. Machines now reason through problems that once required doctoral training. Algorithms compose music, generate images, and write poetry that many listeners cannot distinguish from human work. The boundaries that seemed so clear are becoming blurred.

It's worth noting that this is not a new anxiety. Every technological revolution has prompted a reconsideration of human uniqueness. What is different this time is the speed and the scope.

Perhaps the answer lies not in what we can do, but in how we experience doing it. A machine can process a sunset into wavelengths and intensities. It cannot feel the particular ache of watching one alone. Experts argue that this qualitative dimension of consciousness, sometimes called qualia, represents a genuine frontier that computation may never cross.

Consider the following dimensions of human experience:

• Mortality: We know we will die, and this knowledge shapes every choice we make.
• Embodiment: We think through bodies that hunger, tire, and age.
• Relationship: We become ourselves only through others.

Each of these speaks to something that no amount of processing power can replicate. Our limitations are not bugs in the human condition. They are features.

The decision to find meaning emerges from a uniquely human place. Culture shifts, technology advances, and the conversation moves forward, but the human need to make sense of existence remains constant.

This is where narrative comes in. We are storytelling animals. We do not simply live through events; we weave them into arcs with beginnings, middles, and ends. This capacity for meaning-making may be the most profoundly human trait of all.

Studies show that people who report a strong sense of purpose live longer, healthier lives. The implications are significant.

Despite the challenges posed by rapid technological change, humanity continues to thrive. The question of what makes us human will not be settled by any single discovery or breakthrough. It will be answered, as it always has been, in the daily choices we make about how to treat one another.

What makes us human, in the end, is not what we are. It's what we choose to become.

Ultimately, as we navigate this evolving landscape, one thing remains clear: the future belongs to those who can hold both technological progress and human values in the same hand. That is a challenge worth embracing.

A machine can process a sunset as wavelengths and intensities. It cannot tell us what it feels like to watch one alone.

That difference has become harder to ignore as machines take on work once used to define human ability. They solve difficult problems, compose music, generate images, and write poetry. If we define ourselves only by what we can do, each new capability makes the boundary less certain.

Experience gives us a more useful place to look. We know we will die, and that knowledge shapes our choices. We think through bodies that hunger, tire, and age. We become ourselves through relationships with other people. These limits are part of the experience, not defects outside it.

We also turn events into stories. A life does not arrive with a beginning, middle, and end already marked. We choose what to connect and what it means. The story may change as we do.

This does not settle whether a machine can be conscious or whether human experience is unique. The source draft offers no evidence strong enough to settle either question. It does suggest a smaller claim worth keeping: capability alone is a thin definition of a person.

The daily choices remain. How do we treat another person who is tired, frightened, aging, or alone? Whatever technology can produce, that question still belongs to us.

To be human is to be imperfect, and sometimes I think that we lose sight of that.

Take writing. When we think about AI-generated writing, we think about it having to be this perfect copy of what human writing would look like. But if you think about it, AI is probably going to give you the average of everything else. It's not necessarily going to give you the mix of an individual human being's experiences that led them to write a thing, or to write about a thing, or to include their specific experiences in there. Sometimes I feel like we lose track of the ingredients that make something feel like it's human. I hope that we don't lose track of that.

Here's something strange about people that I haven't written down before. We sometimes expect machines to be perfect. And we also expect each other to act like machines at times as well.

The more that you see people using AI and getting things done quickly, getting responses done fast, getting all of these things done quickly, you sometimes think, oh, well, I should expect that same experience from people. Do we all have the room to be more productive and more efficient and effective? Well, yeah, we do. But we're also not machines, and part of that is about being human. We have to afford each other more grace than we do silicon sometimes.

When I think about humans and being human, I think about family and I think about friends.

It gets very easy for those of us in the tech community to focus a lot on being next to a screen and being plugged in and focused on productivity. We're in this grind around work because many of us enjoy our work. And so we find it easy to get lost in that work, even if, using the exact same technology, we could be reaching out a little bit more easily to our friends, our families, building human connections.

Especially where I live in the Bay Area, you're probably more likely to see people trying to go out of their way to spin up more AI agents to do even more things than necessarily go out of their way to build more meaningful human connections. It's because they feel like they get something more out of the work side of things.

It's not to say that AI can't be some sort of replacement for something. It's non-judgmental. You can talk to it. But it's not quite the same as talking to someone that's human, and I hope that we realize that.

What frightens or annoys me is that very often we ask ourselves how can we use technology to solve problems, and sometimes those problems are human problems rather than problems that technology alone can solve. It's sort of like that old thing where if you have a solution, you will try to find a problem that matches the solution that you have.

So I'm hopeful that we can find ways to use AI to encourage folks to build and keep and have human connections. Can we use it to create more space in our lives for human experiences? Can we use it to help us create more bridges with other people?

We talk about saving all of this time from AI, and of course then filling up that time with even more work. It would annoy me if we only used AI to generate more and more and more work rather than being able to create meaning and forge better relationships with people, deeper friendships with people, keep the human element alive. I think there's something to it.

What I would like you to hold when you finish reading this is a sense of fragile warmth. I don't want people to think that AI is bad or that humanity is doomed. But I want them to look at their hands and feel protective over the messy biological reality of being alive and being human.

I think there's something really wonderful there, and I'm hopeful that we continue to appreciate it and we don't lose it.