Most of my meetings these days are about artificial intelligence. Efficiency. Automation. Optimization.
At first, these words sound exciting. They promise progress, productivity, speed. But the more I listen to these conversations, the more I feel that this trajectory is not only limiting, but also counterproductive.
First, we are missing the truly transformative part of AI. We keep asking for better candles while technology may already offer us electricity. We settle for minor adjustments instead of embracing the possibility of completely reimagining how we work, think, and live.
Second, it is a lost battle if we frame it as a competition. Machines will always process more data, faster and more accurately than we ever could. Plus, what we see today is only a fragment of what is to come. We still think in linear terms, while the world (and especially technology) moves exponentially.
And then, there is what machines will never reach. Imagine a doctor who notices a symptom no test has revealed, simply because she has learned to trust her intuition. Or a lawyer who senses, in the hesitation of a client’s voice, that the full truth has not yet surfaced. These are not “soft skills,” but deeper forms of presence, intuition, embodied knowledge. They cannot be taught to an algorithm.
In our rush to digitize everything, we risk forgetting this. We are not datasets, nor strings of zeros and ones. We are living systems of memories and emotions that escape measurement. The more we consider ourselves data centers, the more we diminish what makes us human. And we still know so little about ourselves. Almost nothing about energy. Almost nothing about the human brain. Almost nothing about the universe.
One of my favorite figures of the 20th century, Nikola Tesla, once said that if you want to know the secrets of the universe, you should think in terms of vibration, frequency, and energy. Perhaps this is what we are missing when we reduce people to data points. Machines should help us rediscover our humanity. They should free us to listen, to connect, to sense. To remember what it means to be human.
What I am seeing, however, points in the opposite direction: a growing temptation to treat people as processes, as bundles of data, as problems to be optimized. Instead of elevating ourselves, we are becoming less sensitive to what really matters.
So the question remains: are we using technology in the right way, or are we outsourcing our very humanity to the systems we have built?
