My uncle got his first computer when I was in middle school. This was the 90s.
Back then, he wore White Zombie T-shirts every day. One of their biggest songs was “More Human Than Human.”
My uncle was also a wannabe hacker.
He found an exploit in his school’s computer system and got suspended for changing grades for himself and a few friends. It was the most rebellious thing ever. So naturally, I wanted to become a hacker too.
One day, I opened MS-DOS and tried creating a program that could kick people off AOL. I had zero programming experience (I was 11), so I typed to the computer:
“Make a program that punts people off AOL Instant Messenger.”
Then I got an error message because… well, computers didn’t work that way. At least not yet.
Today, you can sit down in front of a screen, describe what you want like I’m talking to you, and AI will help you build it.
Most people think this means machines are becoming more human. But I think the opposite is happening.
Yes, AI will keep getting smarter. It’ll talk like a person and even feel like a person.
But it’s not human. Not in the way that makes humans human.
I mean things like:
Ambition.
Taste.
Lived experience.
Internal drive.
A desire to create something from nothing.
Vision.
These are uniquely human characteristics.
AI may imitate them, but it will never actually possess them.
As AI absorbs more mechanical work, uniquely human qualities become more valuable.
The machine can generate. But humans decide what matters.
Humanity itself becomes the bottleneck.
For most of human history, there was a massive gap between what a person could imagine and what they could bring into the world.
But now, AI shortens the distance between imagination and reality.
A single person can externalize thought itself.
And ironically, the rise of AI will force people to confront what is uniquely human about themselves.
Because AI will never possess the thing it depends on most:
the human element.
And that will make you more human than human.
