Imagine you are a human being.

What makes you special? Unique? Valuable to society?

I suppose we could ask the same question to an AI, something decidedly not a human being, and get an interesting answer that might give us some insight.

In fact, I did just that.

I asked ChatGPT… and it replied with a very long answer that it summarized like this: “What makes someone special isn’t that they’re irreplaceable because of their abilities. It’s that they’re irreplaceable because of who they are, and valuable because of what they choose to contribute.”^[1]

See, we humans define ourselves by our roles, attaching identity to our jobs and our hobbies as much as anything else, so after years of handing over our roles to systems and platforms what does human identity even mean anymore? What makes us special, unique and valuable to society over a machine that can pretend to be and, any or all of those things, and often more?

And that’s the big philosophical question, isn’t it?  We’ve replaced so much of ourselves with technology, handed over tasks, memory, and thinking to algorithms and cloud storage systems and logical processes siphoned through data centres, that maybe it is worth stopping for a moment to ask what remains fundamentally human?

I have been working with and for technology for most of my career and I have some thoughts.  I’ll be exploring my own Venn diagram of intersection and exclusion from the human-tech experience under the topic Roles & Perspective as I continue writing on this blog. Stay tuned.