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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a conversation I had with my late friend and mentor Eva Brann as the gathering storm of new technologies approaches ever closer. The most obvious of these worries of course is AI and what it will do to our society and our humanity. It will take so much individual fortitude to remain human under these new circumstances. The question, however, that hangs amongst these clouds is — why remain human? When weighed against all the tragedy that the human condition necessarily entails, what is so good about human being it even ought to be preserved?
I think that remains an open question. Yet anyone who through fortuna happens to stumble across the conversation above will no doubt answer yes, unquestionably we must persist in retaining our humanity! And there was really no one better to have conversations such as this with than Eva Brann. With her death on October 28, 2024, the world lost one of the most humane individuals that has ever graced this earth. And it is in that spirit, I wanted to pull this discussion out of the archive and release it again here at Koinos — an organization dedicated to restoring humanity to the Humanities.
I firmly believe a great humanistic revolt is brewing against this gathering storm. We live in an age of great technical proficiency — perhaps the greatest that has ever existed. For instance, the musicians and artists that daily bombard me on my social feeds are absolute masters of their craft. Yet I can’t help feeling that something is lacking in these clips — something that I think points us towards why we wish to preserve the essence of our species against these emerging threats.
Technical proficiency is what machines do best. The most ambitious of our age will take this as a challenge to be overcome. It is only our humanity — a humanity based on a dimension of reality that machines have no access to — that I believe will elevate them, and us along with them, above the machines. Skills are not enough. Only a renewed cultivation of the soul will save us.
(Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b 11-22)
