Big Tech is Leaving Humans Behind. Let's Humanize the AI Narrative.

For this month’s newsletter, we’ll explore the concept of human repositioning. That is, how AI can help us become more human, and how it can help us strengthen our very human bonds to each other. 

AI shouldn’t replace us, but elevate us. It should free us to think beyond thinking itself: we’re not human calculators. We’re much more than that. The future is about redefining what being human is all about — and where our worth lies. 

But the biggest obstacle ahead? It’s not actually AI. It’s us. It’s other people. It’s the establishment. It’s big tech. It’s those who want to dehumanize our future. 

Look at the recent ad campaign by software company Artisan, who is selling their own AI assistant. Their billboard read: “Stop hiring humans.” In a blog post, Artisan’s CEO defended the campaign: it was just a bit of trolling, he said. They didn’t mean it literally, he assured. 

But his excuses ring hollow. Artisan’s campaign simply stated the quiet part out loud: for much of the tech world, it seems humans are not an investment. The most successful companies — they suggest — will be those that can do without organic employees; synthetics will be all you need. 

This dystopian vision is the latest chapter in tech’s long-running efforts to preserve the status quo. As Douglas Rushkoff recently said during SXSW, tech bros are always talking about disrupting industries — but they’re not interested in disrupting an economic and social structure that benefits them and their companies, and no one else. 

They’re not thinking about the heights humans can scale, but about the depths of their bottom line. 

Behind the hype, there is a lot of dishonesty, bad faith, and lack of vision. AI is inevitable, yes. But our AI future needs humans in it. AI, in fact, needs humans. Sometimes, AI is humans, as the embarrassing case of Builder.ai taught us: behind a programming AI chatbot were 700 anonymous human programmers in India, pretending to be machines.  

But even real AI — such as Large Language Models or Large Reasoning Models — needs humans to learn from. It needs humans to reason. We call these models Artificial Intelligence, but we know they’re not truly intelligent. They don’t actually reason. They simply predict likely responses. 

As a recent paper from Apple reveals, these models can only solve problems they’ve seen before. As soon as problems reach a certain level of complexity, not only do they stop solving them — they actually stop trying. They don’t know how to keep thinking through it, because they’re not actually thinking. They can’t imagine new solutions. 

Which doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. Far from it. In fact, AI is going to be unimaginably useful. At the latest SXSW, we learned how AI might soon help bring extinct species back to life, reverse male infertility, help us conquer outer space, and much else besides. 

So really, we know AI is going to be a part of our future. What we have to figure out, then, is how humans can be a part of it, too. How do we avoid being left out of our own destiny? 

Maybe it’s about reinventing an economy where we revalue what’s uniquely human. 

For decades, we have been placing an increasing emphasis on human cognitive abilities. But now that AI is going to be taking on more of our cognitive — and even physical — load, we might need to start reevaluating other human qualities: our emotions, our empathy, our capacity for creation and invention, our resolve, our social bonds. 

The best future leaders are those who help their teams be more human. Who empower them not just to do more, but to be more. To be weird, as Douglas Rushkoff would say.  The best future leaders are those who, on the contrary, keep hiring humans.