Can AI Make Us More Human?

What Sperm Whales and Ukrainian Refugees Tell Us About AI (and Us)

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

To me, this is the real potential promise of A.I.:
not to make us faster or more efficient, but to make us wiser.
- David Gruber, Project CETI

There was a beautiful op-ed in the New York Times this week by David Gruber, a marine biologist who uses AI to study sperm whale communication patterns. He’s found evidence that sperm whales have a deeply complex language, and advances in AI may actually allow us to unlock that language and communicate with these animals in ways we never thought possible.

As the adult version of the kid who adopted a humpback whale named Half Moon with my allowance when I was ten, I find this pretty awesome.

One quote struck me immediately because it did such a beautiful job of exploding the false binaries that I see plaguing our conversations around AI.

Gruber argues:

Many conservationists perceive technology as a force of extraction and destruction, while many technologists see nature as something to be modeled or optimized. I believe these worlds are not at odds, and when aligned carefully, technology holds the potential to deepen humans’ connection to nature.

The conversation I keep hearing over and over again (in higher ed, of all places) is that we have to choose between staying human and using AI. The choice seems pretty stark.

Fortunately, I think this formulation underestimates both AI and human beings. It also demonstrates a misunderstanding of what humans often use technology to do and trivializes the agency we have to choose.

When AI Helps Us See What Humans Actually Need

I was just at a conference this weekend where the conversation around AI use in the classroom proceeded on typically binary lines. Thoughtful and well educated people argued that AI would destroy our connection to great books and to each other; others pointed out that AI hallucinates (humans do too, I always grumble); still others were concerned about corporate power.

All of these are legitimate concerns in their different ways, but what I tried to emphasize in the conversation was that none of these are inevitable. And perhaps more importantly, none of these are a complete picture of AI’s capacity.

First, our relationship with AI is one that we get to choose.

We don’t, incidentally, get to choose if AI exists. It’s already here. We do, however, get to choose how to use it in our own lives and how to deploy it in our shared worlds. And it’s here that we can think and should be thinking more about aligning AI use with what it means to be human.

Because focusing entirely on what a nascent technology doesn’t do that well ignores the enormous potential, including ways AI can connect us more deeply to what it means to be human, across a range of contexts.

During the conference, I shared a couple of examples that I think about a lot.

The first was a capstone project by two of our Humanities, Computing and Design (HCD) majors at RIT. The students were hired by USAID because they were able to build an AI model that could scrape data from public Signal chats with Ukrainian and other refugees. Using AI they were able to compile, organize, and share that data with aid organizations to help align aid and need and help deploy resources more quickly and effectively.

One enduring fact about human life is that knowledge about human needs is dispersed. We often don’t know what humans need until we can ask them in person. Many policy failures result from not knowing what humans need and assuming what they need instead. Aid in particular is often slow to arrive and non-ideal when it finally does. Aid lags not just human needs in time, but across space. It’s just too difficult for humans to access, compile and analyze the dispersed knowledge of human need across thousands or tens of thousands of mobile humans, desperate for food, electricity, diapers, or cellphones (maybe all at once). But delivering cellphones to people who need food or vice versa harms not just the people who need aid, but the scarce resources of the aid agencies themselves.

In this particular case, undergraduate students used AI to organize publicly available records at many times the speed of human analysts, allowing quicker and more accurate deployment of scarce resources to those who need it most.

AI connected us not just to each other, but made one of the most important things about us as a species - our compassion - more effective.

AI and Our Aging Future

The second example is a problem facing a growing number of the “sandwich generation” and one I think about a lot when I consider the struggles my mom had trying to keep her father out of a nursing home as he aged. We were ultimately able to keep him on his land until he died at the age of 93, but this success was the result of what amounted to a second job for my mom, across two or more decades.

My grandfather lived in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, with his closest neighbor a mile away. He could barely handle a landline. He was very hard of hearing. He definitely didn’t know how to use a computer. But we also knew that a nursing home would kill him. He didn’t want to move up north. He wanted to stay on his land until he died.

So my mom did what many women do. She took on a full-time second job to keep her dad where he belonged, spending her scant vacation time driving 14 hours down to Tennessee, spending a lot of that time managing health and medical paperwork, financial documents, and sorting things out when a home health aide tried to drain his bank account (we talk a lot about AI’s moral failures, but humans fail pretty spectacularly too).

That was a decade or so ago, but today I can picture a world (one that could exist in the next year or two) where my mom could have kept track of his vitals, monitored his medications, and sent text reminders—none of which would require logging into a complex screen. It would be done in natural language with zero delays and coordination across relatives, medical providers, and on-the-ground caregivers.

He and my mom could have communicated and been much more able to intervene when things went wrong. And of course, they did go wrong. One day he fell on his property and was found many hours later by a neighbor who came to drop something off.

These days, every Apple Watch has fall detection. My Garmin reports my sleep quality and I can take periodic health checks of my heart rate with the touch of a button. My mom could have found out about his fall within minutes, rather than finding out after he had lain on the ground outside struggling to breathe for hours.

I can also imagine a world where AI handles not just monitoring of elderly relatives’ activities (with their consent, of course), but also one where AI monitors prescriptions for possible interactions to reduce medical errors, facilitates billing, reimbursement and receipt management, and coordinates scheduling for meal drop offs. All of this freeing up people like my mom to spend quality time with her dad instead of spending that precious time managing his finances and medications and arguing with him about safety measures.

Sometimes efficiency gains don’t just make us better workers. They give us more time to be connected human beings.

AI and the Human Experience (Spoiler: They’re Linked)

Finally, a great example came from the conference readings themselves, which included this wonderful New Yorker essay by the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, who teaches a class on attention. Burnett describes how students interacted with AI across a range of contexts about what it means to be human. One student walked an AI through an Ignatian examination of conscience, with startling results. Others had conversations about human meaning and one student in particular noted that ChatGPT’s polite and focused attention was a disturbing and disorienting contrast to the lack of attention to each other we often find in the human world.

There were no easy answers, which is perhaps the point. What students engaged with was complex and nuanced and their interactions were equal parts confronting and reassuring and uncanny. And of course AI can mimic humanity so well because it’s built the same way human neural networks are and it’s trained on human data - the good, bad, and the ugly.

Instead of viewing AI as a counter to or in opposition to humanity, we can and should see it as an imperfect mirror, one whose imperfections and improvements on humanity can help us understand our own talents and failings in much richer detail.

The False Choice of Tech. vs. Humanity

The false binary between humanity and technology bedevils undergraduate classes and public policy debates alike. Technology - like everything else humans produce - is only as good as the uses we put it to.

Technology can and does bring us closer together and can pull us farther apart. It can be creative and destructive (sometimes at the same time!). All technological progress comes with tradeoffs of various kinds, some more concerning than others.

But apocalyptic views of technology—and certainly apocalyptic views that assume humans will always use technologies to become inhuman — are both false and dangerous. They’re dangerous because they can prevent us from using technology to make us more human, more connected, and better able to navigate the uncertainty ahead.

The reality is that humans will (usually) use technology to do deeply human things. We’ll use technology to have children and build families. To connect. To communicate. To be in nature. To congregate in both digital and analog forms. To reduce suffering. To watch funny videos of cute animals. To document stupid human tricks. To make each other laugh.

We see this across a number of spaces. There’s growing interest in records as opposed to streaming music. Tons of people use Facebook to coordinate in-person book clubs and gardening shares and knitting circles. The growth of quilt guilds online among millennials and other young people is charming but also hard to explain if you think tech means an inevitable departure from the analog. Some of the most popular YouTube channels are about homesteading or survival in the wilderness and these in turn inspire people to get outside and try their hand at a hike (perhaps even a group hike coordinated via app).

People are using technology in new ways. Yes, some of those new ways can create distance, but many of those new ways actually create connection. And they can create connection in ways that support the most vulnerable among us—whether those are endangered species, elderly relatives, refugees fleeing war-torn spaces or just lonely people who want to find someone to knit with.

It Comes Down to Human Choice

Of course, all of this boils down to human choice. What we do with these technologies matters. Whether technologies will make vulnerable populations more supported and safer or much more vulnerable—that’s up to us.

It’s up to us to decide how we use these technologies individually and how we structure the regulations we decide to implement together.

But it’s really dangerous (and irresponsible too), especially for those in higher education, to assume that artificial intelligence means the death of our humanness.

In fact, it could be how we connect in a much, much deeper way. Sometimes that connection is with the people we love. Other times it’s with the natural order that we struggle to understand enough to protect.

If AI can help us talk to whales, imagine what it might help us say to each other.

Your Turn

Can you think of examples of technology creating deeper human connection rather than distance? Drop ideas or whatever else you have in the comments. I would love to hear them! And if you like this post, please share! Shares are still how 99% of people find my work. Thanks as always for reading!

[AI use disclosure: I drafted this post via voice memo while unpacking from my recent trip. I used Claude.ai, which has been trained on my voice with my other writings, to pull the voice memo into a rough draft. I then heavily revised the rough draft. The time I saved I spent, in part, watching my daughter run a turkey trot this week at our local elementary school while chatting with our neighbors.]