The Diminishing Human

Can we retain our humanness in the age of intelligent machines?

Durlabham trayamevaitad-devanugraha-hetukam; Manusyatvam mumumksvtvam mahapurusasamsrayah

These are three things which are rare indeed and are due to grace of God—namely a human birth, the longing of liberation, and the protecting care of a perfected sage.

Vivekchudamani-3

If Birth in the human body is a rare privilege among the uncountable living creatures. Manusyatvam—the desire to be free, to be free of all conditioning, and to realize one's essential reality, a merger with the divine—is a human thing. A human being can stand back and contemplate its own thinking; to be self-aware and conscious is a human thing.

To propagate the human body and consciousness as limitations, subject to failure and inaccuracy, is to propagate an unfounded conjecture. “The human being is not the final product of evolution; man is a thinking and living laboratory in which nature is working out something far greater than itself—the manifestation of the divine in material form,” said Sri Aurobindo.

To promote the non-biological human form as the next leap in ‘biological evolution’ is to limit the scope of being human infinitely. Such conclusions are not only narrow but also reductionist in their view. It is now a battle between Paroksha Jnana (परोक्ष ज्ञान) (indirect knowledge, heard, read, or inferred) vs. Aparoksha Jnana (अपरोक्ष ज्ञान) (directly realized knowledge; personally experienced and verified).

The timeline includes the following key events: 1950—the Turing test; 1956—the birth of artificial intelligence; and 2012—a breakthrough in deep learning. In 2025, AI achieves the human-likeness benchmark, with ChatGPT 4.5 successfully passing it. The Turing test is passed 73% of the time, and this rate is expected to improve.

AI is not in us; we are encapsulated in it. We are passing through technological ambivalence—we are beginning to question if AI is indeed ‘better’ and ‘smarter’ than us and are almost ‘convinced’ that it is.

What really is a human being without attention, without the ability to concentrate, and hardly able to observe life? According to Pew research, 23% of young adults under age 35 prefer digital relationships to human ones. There is a condition known as AI psychosis, where individuals become so emotionally affected that they lose touch with external reality, causing the digital world to feel more real than the physical one.

The recommended social media reel duration is less than one minute because people's attention spans are shorter than that. Cognitive load is at an all-time low; this phenomenon essentially means the human brain is not exercising its muscles to think. There is a drastic increase in digital dementia among the 35-44 age group. This phenomenon is giving a “fog zone” experience—where one is lost for words and has vocabulary loss.

Which way do we go now? Are we becoming humanoids, or are we retaining our ability to think independently? Our humanness and our latent capacities for consciousness are natural to us; a progressive unfolding of what we truly are will set us free from the ‘AI-technical world’ into which we are being led.