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AI Is Already Fusing With Us — The Only Question Is How
The argument about whether AI will enhance or diminish our our humanity usually starts in the wrong place. People argue about what AI should do before asking a more basic and uncomfortable question: what are humans for?
Every powerful technology embeds an answer to that question. AI is no exception. In fact, it may be the most consequential case yet, because AI is not just a tool we use—it is a system that increasingly co-thinks with us, shapes our attention, edits our language, nudges our choices, and quietly rewires our sense of agency.
We are not facing a future of humans versus machines. We are already living in a world of human–machine fusion.
The real issue is not whether this fusion will happen. It is what kind of fusion it will be.
There Is No Such Thing as “Human Values”
Much of the public discussion of AI ethics rests on a fantasy: that “human values” exist as a coherent, global, agreed-upon set of principles that AI can be aligned with.
They don’t.
Value, purpose, and meaning are social constructions. They vary radically across cultures, religions, and political systems—and they always have. What one society calls a meaningful life, another calls wasted. What one treats as sacred, another treats as irrelevant or dangerous.
There is no global agreement on what humans are for. Expecting a worldwide technology like AI to be guided by a single, shared vision of human purpose is naïve at best, dishonest at worst.
There Will Be Many AIs, Just as There Are Many Religions
Because there is no single answer to what humans are for, there will be no single AI.
There will be many forms of AI, each reflecting the values—explicit or implicit—of the cultures, institutions, and power structures that create them. Some will be optimized for surveillance, compliance, and efficiency. Others will be built to extend memory, imagination, and self-understanding.
In blunt terms: some AIs will enslave us; others could help liberate us.
The enslaving versions will treat humans as components to be managed—predictable, optimizable, correctable. Friction will be treated as inefficiency. Deviance as error. Interior life as noise.
The liberating versions will function as prostheses for the mind—tools that expand rather than replace human capacities. They will support reflection rather than manipulation, agency rather than control, curiosity rather than conformity.
The difference is not technical. It is philosophical.
AI as Prosthesis vs. AI as Manager
We already accept prostheses for the body—glasses, hearing aids, pacemakers—because they restore or extend human function without claiming authority over the person. AI can play a similar role for cognition: augmenting memory, pattern recognition, synthesis, and imagination.
But there is a sharp boundary here.
A cognitive prosthesis supports a human agent.
A cognitive manager displaces one.
The danger is not that AI becomes intelligent. The danger is that it becomes normative—quietly deciding what matters, what counts, what is worth attention, and what is not.
Once that happens, humans do not disappear. They persist as interfaces.
The Question We Can’t Outsource
AI forces us to confront a question we have long evaded: what kind of humans do we want to be when much of our thinking is no longer done alone?
There will be no final answer. There never has been. Meaning has always been plural, unstable, and contested.
But refusing to ask the question does not keep us neutral. It simply allows markets, states, and optimization systems to answer it for us—implicitly, automatically, and without appeal.
AI will fuse with us. That is already happening.
The only choice left is whether we fuse as authors of our lives—or as managed systems optimized for goals we did not choose.
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The above text is the response of ChatGPT5.2 to a prompt asking it to develop ideas in a long paragraph I wrote into a potential MindBlog post, followed by a second prompt asking it to alter its first excellent response into a shorter and more polemical version.
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