The story goes like this: AI is going to take your job, rot your brain, and replace the relationships that make life worth living. We’ll become passive, dependent, emotionally hollowed-out, a species that forgot how to think because we outsourced it to machines.
I’ve heard this narrative from smart people. I’ve read it in serious publications. I understand why it lands.
It’s also wrong.
Not partially wrong. Not wrong-in-ways-that-need-nuance. Wrong in the way that the loudest, most confident predictions tend to be, because they’re extrapolating from fear rather than observation.
What I’m seeing, both in my own life and in the people around me, is the opposite. AI isn’t making us less human. It’s giving many of us, for the first time, the tools to become more fully human.
That sounds like a stretch. Stay with me.
The Pause Before the Reaction
Something happened to me a while back that I keep coming back to. I received an email that made me furious. The kind that hits a nerve you didn’t know was exposed. My instinct was to fire back immediately.
Instead, I opened a chat with an AI and typed out everything I was feeling. Not what I wanted to say in the email. What I actually felt. What was really going on underneath the anger.
The AI didn’t tell me to calm down. It helped me untangle what was happening. And by the time I was done, I realised I wasn’t actually angry about the email. I was anxious about something else, and the email had been a convenient target.
I wrote a completely different reply. A better one. Probably a more honest one.
This is what I mean when I say AI is making us more human. Emotional intelligence isn’t innate. It’s a skill. Most of us were never properly taught it. We react, we escalate, we say things we regret, and we repeat the cycle because we don’t have the tools to interrupt it.
AI is that tool. Not a replacement for therapy, not a substitute for genuine human relationships, but a thinking partner available at 11pm on a Tuesday when you need to work through something before you make it worse. I’ve written before about how AI turned my dead zones into productive hours, but this goes deeper than productivity.
If you’ve ever wished you could talk to someone before a difficult phone call, someone who’d help you figure out what you actually want to say, this is that. The fact that it’s powered by a language model doesn’t make the emotional work less real. You still have to do the work. The AI just creates the space for it.
Parenting Without the Script
Here’s one I don’t hear discussed enough: AI as a parenting lifeline.
Most of us are parenting without a manual, using whatever our own parents modelled for us, which is to say: we’re winging it based on data that may be 30 years out of date and filtered through one family’s particular set of patterns and blind spots.
When your child is having a meltdown, or lying to your face, or shutting you out for reasons you can’t decode, the options used to be: react instinctively (usually not great) or read a parenting book (which you don’t have time for and which won’t speak to the specific situation in front of you right now).
Now you can ask. You can describe what’s happening, in plain language, and get evidence-based approaches that are calibrated to your child’s age and the specific behaviour you’re dealing with. Not generic advice. Specific, practical, here’s-what-you-might-try guidance.
This doesn’t mean outsourcing your judgment to an algorithm. It means having access to a body of child development research that most of us would never have read, delivered in a way that’s actually useful in the moment.
The parents who use this aren’t becoming less present or less engaged. They’re becoming more equipped. And more equipped parents are calmer, more consistent, and more likely to break the cycles that would otherwise get passed down another generation.
The Language of Love You Were Never Taught
This one goes deeper, and I’ll say it plainly: some of us grew up in families where affection wasn’t expressed, where difficult conversations were avoided, where love was shown through practicality rather than words.
That’s not a criticism of anyone’s parents. It’s just a reality for a lot of people. And it means that as adults, we can struggle with things that seem like they should be natural. Telling people we love them. Having honest conversations about what we need. Showing up for the people who matter to us in ways they can actually receive.
The good news is these aren’t fixed traits. They’re learnable. The harder news is that learning them as an adult is uncomfortable, because it involves acknowledging what you didn’t get and figuring out how to give it anyway.
AI can be part of that. You can ask how to have a conversation you’ve been avoiding. You can practise what you want to say. You can understand why something feels so hard, and what it might look like to do it differently.
This is genuinely human work. The fact that a machine is helping doesn’t make it less so. A book could help you in the same way. A therapist could help you in the same way. The difference is that AI is available, patient, non-judgmental, and infinitely willing to go at your pace.
Breaking generational patterns is some of the most important work a person can do. If AI makes it more accessible, that’s not a threat to our humanity. That’s an extension of it.
No Such Thing as a Stupid Question
There’s a particular kind of intellectual embarrassment that I think is more common than people admit. It’s the feeling of being too intimidated to ask about something in public, because the gap between what you know and what you’re supposed to know feels too wide.
I’ve felt this. I’ve steered conversations away from topics I didn’t understand because I didn’t want to expose the gap. I’ve avoided exploring fields I was genuinely curious about because the entry cost, socially and intellectually, felt too high.
AI changed that for me.
I’ve asked AI to explain things I felt I should have known at 25. I’ve started from zero on topics that interested me without having to perform competence I didn’t have. There’s no judgment, no sighing, no subtle condescension. You can ask the question you think is obvious, and you’ll get an answer that meets you where you are.
This is not laziness. It’s learning without the social friction that has always been a barrier, particularly for people who didn’t grow up in environments where curiosity was encouraged and knowledge was freely shared.
The people who are going to thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones who avoid AI because it feels like cheating. They’re the ones who use it to learn faster, explore more widely, and build genuine understanding instead of performing it.
What This Means for Our Kids
I have three young children, and this is where the conversation gets personal for me.
The instinct many parents have is to keep AI away from kids. To treat it like social media or screen time, something to be rationed and feared. I understand that instinct. But I think it’s the wrong one.
Think about what education has always struggled with: the fact that every child learns differently, at a different pace, with different gaps and different strengths. A classroom teacher with 25 students simply cannot give each child the individual attention they need. It’s not a failure of teachers. It’s a structural limitation.
AI changes that equation. A child who’s struggling with fractions can have them explained ten different ways until one clicks. A child who’s fascinated by space or dinosaurs or how engines work can follow that curiosity as far as it goes, in real time, with answers calibrated to what they already understand.
Research has shown for decades that one-on-one tutoring produces dramatically better outcomes than classroom instruction. The problem was always scale. You can’t give every child a personal tutor. Now you can get remarkably close.
The children who grow up knowing how to work with AI, how to ask good questions, how to evaluate the answers they get, how to use it as a thinking tool rather than a crutch, will have an enormous advantage. Not because AI will do their thinking for them, but because they’ll have learned how to think more effectively with its help.
I want my kids to grow up comfortable with these tools, not afraid of them. The goal isn’t to raise children who depend on AI. It’s to raise children who are amplified by it.
The Jobs Argument (And Why It’s the Least Interesting One)
Yes, let’s talk about jobs. Because this is where most of the alarm is concentrated, and it deserves a clear-eyed response.
Every major technological shift in history has been accompanied by the same prediction: that this time, the machines will take everything and leave nothing behind. The Industrial Revolution moved millions of people off farms and into factories. Many jobs were lost. Far more were created. The nature of work changed, but the quantity of work didn’t collapse.
Computers automated enormous swathes of clerical and manufacturing work. People predicted mass unemployment. Instead, the economy created software developers, network engineers, UX designers, data analysts, and entire industries that didn’t exist before. The internet did the same thing. Smartphones did the same thing.
The jobs of 2035 will include roles we genuinely cannot name right now, because they depend on tools and workflows that don’t exist yet. This isn’t optimism. It’s pattern recognition.
What will be true is that the transition is uncomfortable, and the people who get hurt in transitions are real people with real lives. That matters, and it deserves serious policy attention. But the macro story, the idea that AI uniquely ends human employment, doesn’t hold up against the evidence of how every previous technological revolution actually played out.
If anything, the scarcity we’re heading towards is human scarcity. Human judgment, human creativity, human connection, and human relationship. As AI handles more of the routine cognitive work, the things that only humans can genuinely provide go up in value. Not down.
What I Actually Believe
I run a company called AgentVania that helps businesses implement AI agents. I also run a community called The Good Life Collective, which is entirely focused on human connection.
These aren’t contradictions. They’re two sides of the same belief: AI and automation for business, human connection for life.
AI handles more of the mechanical work, the repetitive, the routine, the cognitively demanding but low-creativity tasks. That frees up time and attention for the things that matter. For relationships. For learning. For being present. For doing the emotional work that most of us have been putting off because we were too busy or too under-equipped.
The doom narrative assumes AI is a replacement for human things. What I’ve experienced is the opposite. Used intentionally, it’s a multiplier for human things.
The people I worry about aren’t the ones using AI. They’re the ones so frightened of what it represents that they’re refusing to engage with what it actually offers.
We are not becoming less human. We’re getting new tools to become more of what we already are.
That, I think, is worth paying attention to.
Related
Leave a Reply