What It Means to Be Human

Humanity

8 ARTICLES IN THIS DOMAIN

At the moment machines can do nearly everything, the question of what makes us irreplaceable becomes the most urgent question of our age.

8 Articles
Humanity9 min read

What Makes Us Human When Machines Can Do Everything?

In 2023, an AI passed a medical licensing exam. In 2024, it passed the bar. In 2025, it was writing code indistinguishable from senior engineers. In 2026, the question is no longer 'what can machines do?' The question is 'what can only we do, and what does that mean?'

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Humanity11 min read

What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

For most of history you could answer the question of who you are with what you can do. The machine has quietly taken that answer away. What is left is a question we can no longer outrun.

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Humanity10 min read

The Body in the Age of AI: Why Embodiment Is the Most Important Thing About You

The modern world keeps treating the body as a container the real self rides around in. The AI age is exposing how wrong that is. Almost everything that matters about you begins in your body.

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Humanity12 min read

What Is Consciousness and Why It Matters More Than Ever

I have spent years working close to the machines, and the closer I get, the more one question refuses to leave me. Not whether a system can think, but whether there is anything it is like to be that system. That question is consciousness, and we are building a whole civilisation on top of it without being able to say clearly what it is.

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Humanity11 min read

The Loneliness Epidemic: What Technology Took and What Only Humans Can Give Back

I have watched a strange thing happen, in my own life and in the lives of people I love. Our reach expanded without limit and our sense of being truly met shrank. We are the most connected human beings who have ever lived, and among the loneliest, and I do not think that is a coincidence.

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Humanity12 min read

What It Means to Live a Fully Human Life in a World That Keeps Asking Less of Us

I have started to notice something that unsettles me, and I think it should unsettle you too. The tools of our era are astonishingly good at removing friction, effort, and difficulty from life, and we treat every such removal as a gift. But a fully human life is built out of exactly the things convenience keeps taking away, and I do not think we have reckoned with the trade. This is, in the end, my central conviction. The machine must serve the soul, not replace it.

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Humanity12 min read

What Grief Teaches Us About Being Human: The Emotion We Try to Skip

I have grieved, and I have watched the people around me try to help me skip it, gently and with love, because our culture does not know what to do with grief except to move a person past it as quickly as possible. But grief is not an obstacle on the way to real life. It is one of the most revealing things a human being does, a window into what we actually love and who we actually are. Let me write about it honestly, from Port Harcourt, because we have made it a subject we avoid.

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Humanity12 min read

The Art of Being Present: Why the Hardest Thing Is Also the Most Human

I have sat across from people I love while not being with them at all, my body present and my attention scattered somewhere else, and I have felt the quiet loss in it. Presence, the simple act of giving full attention to the moment and the person in front of you, is one of the most human things we can do and one of the most difficult, and the environment we have built makes it harder every year. I want to write about it seriously, from Port Harcourt, as something to be recovered and defended.

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From the Book

These questions run through The Soul and the Machine.

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