That simple statement raises some complex questions. For one thing, is anybody really anything?
I think there is a 'real' person inside each of us. Another way of saying it is the 'authentic' person. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, the 'authentic' person is the one closest to our unique individual nature and character. It is primarily determined by the particular mixture of genetics and biochemistry we are born with. These express themselves in our physical and emotional traits: our dispositions, capacities and abilities.
We are complex life forms. But if you think of it in plant terms — at the risk of oversimplifying — it's essentially everything that is already in the seed. A package of potential that will grow into the flower it is capable of becoming. And every flower is a little different.
Obviously, the environment plays an enormous role in determining how close the plant comes to realizing the potential contained in its seed. For plants, that environment is relatively easy to manipulate to achieve good results: water, light, nutrient-rich soil and so on. But there are environmental factors that are harder to control: climate, weather, disease, predatory insects.
And plants have virtually no means of effecting their environment to optimize their potentiality. No agency. Whereas we do. We have the ability to extensively shape our environment.
That, essentially, seems to be one of the purposes of consciousness. We don't merely respond to our environment; we can reflect upon it, alter it, and create new environments in which we can live.
And this is where education comes in.
I once had a teacher explain to our classroom that the reason it was important for us to learn the skills we were being taught was so that we could make a living. It was possibly the most jaded and reductive explanation for education I had ever heard. I remember him saying something like, "I am teaching you how to spell like the bankers spell."
Of course, learning the skills necessary to earn a living is important. But that isn't the reason for education.
The Latin root of the word education is educare, meaning to rear, nurture, nourish or bring up. Nowhere in its meaning is the idea of earning money.
The reason for education, in my view, is to nourish the sense of self: to learn how we think, how we learn, what interests us, what we are capable of, and ultimately what we might become.
In that sense, education is really an expansion of consciousness.
Early education should certainly focus on thinking skills and the basic abilities needed to function within society. But during those formative years, children should also be learning something equally important: that what comes naturally to them has value, and that part of growing up is learning how to recognize, develop and trust what they already possess inside themselves.
Instead, we often teach them to distrust it.
We teach them to look outward for the standards by which they should measure themselves. We teach them to adapt to the demands of an external, constructed world, even when those demands conflict with their own inclinations and capacities.
This is isn't accidental.
The modern education system developed alongside the Industrial Revolution, and it inherited an industrial conception of human value. It established a hierarchy of abilities based largely on their economic usefulness. Mathematics and science were highly valued because they produced measurable, practical results. Technical competence was rewarded. Standardization, efficiency and conformity became virtues.
The arts and humanities, meanwhile, were increasingly treated as secondary — worthwhile, perhaps, as a sideline, but not essential or critical.
There is a great irony in what is happening now.
The very abilities our society has spent generations telling us are the most valuable — calculation, pattern recognition, information processing, technical analysis — are precisely the abilities that machines excel at.
And so, strangely enough, the AI revolution may be forcing us to reconsider the very hierarchy of human abilities that helped produce it.
We aren't particularly alarmed when AI is used to perform scientific calculations or analyze enormous quantities of data. But when it begins writing poetry, composing music, creating images or producing human-like conversation, something feels wrong, even threatening. Because those activities were never merely useful to us.
They were how we recognized ourselves.
The AI debate is therefore ultimately a debate about how we define ourselves — about who we really are.
For many decades, we have increasingly thought of human beings as wealth-generating factors of production. We have measured ourselves by what we can produce, how efficiently we can produce it, and how much economic value we can generate.
Perhaps AI will finally force us to confront the poverty of that definition.
Because if a machine can perform more and more of the things we once considered evidence of human intelligence, then what remains uniquely human cannot simply be our ability to calculate, process information or even produce things.
Maybe the answer lies somewhere closer to the seed. Our individual nature. Our particular sensitivities and dispositions. Our capacity for experience, meaning, love, imagination, curiosity and creation. The strange and unpredictable combination of qualities that makes one person different from another.
We spent centuries reshaping our environment in order to make life better, only to begin reshaping ourselves to fit the technological environment we created. We were on track to do more than reshape nature. We were beginning to replace it altogether with a technological alternative.
And now we're starting to freak out about a full-scale takeover.
But perhaps what we're really afraid of isn't that machines will become too much like us. Perhaps we're afraid that, after generations of teaching ourselves to become more useful, more efficient and more productive, we may finally have to confront the possibility that those were never the things that made us human in the first place.
AI isn't just challenging what humans can do. It's challenging us to remember who we really are.
