Why do we need humans when we have AI?

Then the king went up to the blind people and said, ‘Have you seen the elephant?’ ‘Yes, Your Majesty, we have been shown the elephant.’ ‘Then tell us, what kind of thing is an elephant?’

The blind people who had been shown the elephant’s head said, ‘Your Majesty, an elephant is like a pot.’

Those who had been shown the ear said, ‘An elephant is like a winnowing fan.’

Those who had been shown the tusk said, ‘An elephant is like a ploughshare.’

Those who had been shown the trunk said, ‘An elephant is like a plough-pole.’

Those who had been shown the flank said, ‘An elephant is like a storehouse.’

Those who had been shown the leg said, ‘An elephant is like a pillar.’

Those who had been shown the thigh said, ‘An elephant is like a mortar.’

Those who had been shown the tail said, ‘An elephant is like a pestle.’

Those who had been shown the tip of the tail said, ‘An elephant is like a broom.’

Saying, ‘Such is an elephant, not such! Such is not an elephant, such is!’ they punched each other with their fists. At that, the king was pleased.

In the same way, mendicants, the wanderers of other religions are blind and sightless. They don’t understand what is beneficial or what is not beneficial, nor what is the truth and what is not the truth. That’s why they are fighting, quarreling, and disputing, continually wounding each other with barbed words. ‘Such is Truth, such is not! Such is not Truth, such is!’

— the Buddha

In the era of large language models, any conversation you want is at your fingertips. Predictable discussion on any topic is seconds away. No need to remember anything or form opinions of your own—a model has all that trained into its tensors.

This innovation comes at a time of significant polarization across our social, political, and economic arenas. It comes as a continuation of the divisiveness created by algorithmic feeds that serve up curated content ad infinitum, shaping your opinions, actions, and thoughts through subversive means. It is a time where people are defined by their labels and beliefs rather than their actions. Whereas historically, people would be in the same physical location and hold differing beliefs, we can now be in different locations and hold the same beliefs. Anthropologically speaking, this is an unprecedented evolution of the mass communication technology first invented with the Gutenberg printing press.

This has left many people wondering, what is the purpose of humans if a model can outperform average humans today, and any human in the near future? What does it even mean to be human? What is the role of social interaction in an age when the Turing test is not only obsolete, but better passed by a robot than a human?

We will soon find out what happens when you equip everyone with a pocket-sized omnipotent yes-man, and I doubt it will be anything like the utopian Universal Basic Compute future that pundits like Sam Altman want you to believe. In the same way the World Wide Web started as a “digital Wild West,” over the course of two decades it became ubiquitous and deeply commercialized to the point of creating the most valuable companies on earth. We have seen this movie before with different actors. Entrepreneurs and investors need it to be different this time, but the incentives at play make that impossible. It’s too profitable to tell people what they want to hear; this simple idea is a first principle for understanding the zeitgeist in 2025.

With a lot to be pessimistic about, I have a glimmer of hope. Several different people in my mid-20s cohort have independently spoken to me about wanting to break free of their digital chains. They are starting to see Instagram and TikTok for what they are—engagement treadmills—and wanting to delete them and return to a simpler mode of interaction. Many in Gen Z are starting to wake up to the fact that their precious time has been harvested for ad revenue, the future that The Matrix tried to warn us about back in 1999. But we aren’t out of the woods yet; realizing that there is a problem is one thing, but acting on it is another. The tough part about this problem in particular is that each person must independently decide to return to the real world. No one is coming to save you.

There is a prescription for the disease but it is a bitter pill. The “return to the real world” is marked by removing reliance on social media for belief systems and ceasing to use AI for organizing unorganized thought. These platforms are rip currents toward regression to the mean: they pull strongly and you can’t swim against them, only away from them. The stochastic, empty content these apps generate renders dynamic individuals lifeless. By choosing to abstain, you choose clarity and fulfillment over immediate satisfaction. Fill the void by talking to people and learning to live with both your perfect imperfections and theirs.

LLMs shine a bright light on the beauty of humanity: that we all have a unique combination of experiences that create a whole self greater than the sum of its parts. One of the things that makes someone valuable isn’t knowing a lot, it’s knowing a limited but unique set of information that inadvertently yields creativity in constraints. What makes people beautiful is their ability to connect ideas in unique ways. Their sheer unpredictability.

We are all blind men: all we ever get in this life is a small piece of a huge picture. LLMs promise a future where we can all get the big picture, but, if anything, they box us into an even more limited worldview, giving blind men ammunition to spray assertions all over the internet. Things will get worse before they get better.

To get through this tumultuous time, we will all have to independently decide to return to the real world, to accept that human relationships are messy and that people do unpredictable things. Therein lie the fruits of life, the sources of pure, unencumbered joy.