What It Means to Be Human in the Age of AI

As a Computer Science major who has experimented with Artificial Intelligence (AI) since 2019, I have witnessed its extraordinary pace of development. Since the ChatGPT moment of 2022, progress that once seemed years away shrank into months and weeks. As machines increasingly demonstrate capabilities we once considered uniquely human, one question keeps me awake: When machines can replicate nearly everything we once believed only humans could do, what, if anything, still defines us as human?

Consider a famous musical piece written in the eighteenth century. Its name, composer, and historical context does not matter. What matters is that centuries later, it is still performed by human musicians and listened to with respect. This persists despite computer programmes capable of replicating every pitch and timing with perfect accuracy. Yet, we continue to value live performances, even when technical perfection is much more achievable elsewhere. 

This practice extends beyond music. Machines now surpass humans at chess, generate stories at a moments notice, and even produce intricate embroidery. Still, people devote years to mastering chess, writing novels, or learning hand-weaving - practices that are slower, much more labor-intensive, and often less efficient than their machined counterparts. What explains our continued attachment to these seemingly inefficient forms of creation? 

One way to make sense of this attachment to seemingly inefficient practices is through Xunzi’s account of human nature. Xunzi shows that humans are defined by the need to impose friction on themselves in order to coexist. In this view, inefficiencies are not mere flaws, but the necessary costs of living a human life

We are “born having desires”, which leads to chaos when everyone seeks immediate satisfaction. To ensure stability, rituals in the form of rules are imposed to construct limits to our desire seeking, and to teach us restraint. 

We enact artificial barriers on our impulses, such as waiting for our turn in queues, which slow us down and regulate our behavior. 

Slowness is necessarily built into society, in order to counteract the destabilizing tendencies of human desire and excess emotions.

This can also be seen clearly in age-old processes like funerals, which are purposefully slow. If its main purpose is to send away the dead, one could make do without an elaborate, long process, as Mo Zi advocated. Yet, Xunzi explains that these lengthy rituals regulate proper feelings, and to rush these processes is to be “close to being a beast.”

Unlike machines, which are designed to be as efficient as possible, we humans depend on these inefficiencies to regulate our emotions and sustain social order. 

While Xunzi emphasizes the role of inefficiency in regulating ourselves, Omelas reveal another dimension of what it means to be human: to understand that not everything is optimizable. Some members leave even when they know of no definite better alternative.

An AI works by optimizing for a predefined goal. Within such a framework, a machine optimizing for happiness will always choose to stay in Omelas. 

Yet, to be human is to recognize that such frameworks have limitations. Not all values can be quantified or calculated. What defines and differentiates humans, then, is the ability to reject metrically superior outcomes when they are premised on morally unacceptable conditions

Taken together, these acts of regulation and refusal point to a shared idea: human life cannot be reduced to outcomes alone. The processes that generate these outcomes also carry significance. 

Xunzi explicitly rejected Mozi's emphasis on outcomes. He argued that rituals are valuable not merely for the result they produce, but because going through these processes shape proper dispositions and cultivate a noble man.

For instance, the act of greeting the elderly is not valuable simply because it upholds societal expectations, but because repeated action inculcates and sustains a sense of respect and deference for others

According to confucianism, the process of learning is itself a central goal, not merely for its practical outcomes, but because life’s purpose is the continual pursuit of self improvement and refinement. 

In Omelas, those who walk away reject a prosperous outcome because it simply cannot justify a process that requires a child’s suffering. 

A society that automates such meaningful processes therefore reduces opportunities for self-cultivation, turning us from learned people into mere consumers of outcomes. 

A machine just produces results without becoming anything, while humans become something through the process of result creation. For us, the “how” matters as much as the “what”, because it shapes who we are. 

Xunzi says we have to constantly be engaging and exercising the distinctly human aspects of ourselves in order to be fully human. Deciding whether to automate a task, then, is not merely about speeding it up, but about judging whether human participation still carries developmental value. In a future of increasingly capable AI, what defines us as humans lies in the practices we choose to keep for ourselves, precisely because they shape who we become.

The question, then, is no longer what machines can do for us, but what we are willing to give up doing, and what that choice makes us become. And the challenge is deciding which inefficiencies are worth preserving, and which are unjustifiable. If autonomous vehicles can drastically reduce accidents, or robotic surgeons can significantly improve surgical outcomes, is it still ethical for humans to insist on occupying those roles? Perhaps these are the defining questions we are forced to confront as AI continues to advance.