At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bit about the resolution to “stay human” in 2024, in a world that is calling for artificial intelligence to be incorporated into more spheres of life, including law, automated driving, entertainment, and even relationships. In such a world, our own capacities and skillsets will necessarily diminish. If I offload my responsibility to write an essay to ChatGPT, my ability to write an essay on my own will deteriorate. These technologies that seem to make us more powerful are actually making us weaker. That is, of course, if we let them.

Journalist Susannah Black Roberts wrote helpfully on staying human in a recent Substack article, in which she comments,

Yes, it’s important to get the philosophy right: to understand that ChatGPT has no intelligence, that no computer program can have an immaterial intellect, that the Turing Test was always a terrible way to measure what it claimed to. But it’s important too to live in such a way as to practice those human skills, both embodied and intellectual, that a world of internet and ChatGPT might seem to drive away. This AI world has no bodies and no minds, and yet seems to imply the obsolescence of both: we must insist that neither are obsolete, and we must use both; we must not let our being-human skills grow rusty.

№ 29: Lewis the Anglican (substack.com)

The more we ascribe minds to robots, the more we may be tempted to assume that our own minds are replaceable. Black Roberts goes on to suggest ways we can preserve our human skill. The basic gist of it is to do human things. We need to perform ordinary human activities. She continues,

You might start cooking more regularly rather than eating takeout; you might learn to sew or to crochet; you might learn Latin or throw in-person dinner parties; you might read an actual novel, not on a screen, or start running again; you might garden or have long conversations with your friends in person.

She calls this the “Stay Human Movement” and is trying to start a hashtag on Twitter to amass a group of people who are still willing to invest in the goodness and beauty of human life and all the messiness it entails.

I for one often prefer to eat takeout, because it’s easy. Why do the work myself when someone else can do it for me? But, depending on fast food restaurants both damages my overall health and causes me to miss out on the joy of a good activity: that of making dinner, either for myself or for a group of people.

The call to stay human isn’t just in retaliation to AI, which is impressive technology and has its array of uses. It is more so an attempt to say “no” to instant gratification, of offloading the burden of life to our machines and experiencing mental, spiritual, physical atrophy as a result. The overused example of this is depending on Google Maps for directions and losing one’s basic orientation of the world. Depending on technology may feel like power (akin to a wizard wielding magic) but in the long run it can turn us into slaves.

So, what skills, hobbies, or interests will you take up to maintain what makes human life meaningful? Reading books? Starting a garden? How about starting a book club at a coffee shop, or simply taking more time to say hello to people in your neighborhood? This year, the hashtag #StayHuman will hopefully go viral, and our personal lives and communities will be enriched.