Every age tells itself the same story.
At each threshold of invention, we pause and declare: this is the moment we are about to lose ourselves. A hundred years ago, the automobile, the gramophone, and the typewriter were accused of weakening memory, dulling attention, and flattening emotion. Centuries earlier, the printing press was said to erode memory and oral culture. The invention of firearms was thought to destroy courage. The factory system to dissolve community.
Today, we rehearse the same lament: smartphones are breaking our attention, social media is hollowing our relationships, streaming dulls our imagination. And now, with artificial intelligence, we say it again: this is the time we risk losing our very essence.
But the unsettling truth is this: the loss is never only in the future. It is already behind us.
Humanity as a Shifting Baseline
Ecologists speak of “shifting baselines.” A fisherman judges the health of the sea by comparing today’s catch to that of his youth — unaware that his youth was already a degraded remnant of what once was. Each generation accepts the world it inherits as normal. What has vanished before one’s lifetime is not felt as loss.
Humanity itself may be subject to the same erosion.
Our bodies are weaker than those of our ancestors. Our diets are manufactured more than grown. Our inner lives are increasingly sustained by medication. Our rituals have been replaced with entertainment. Our words are compressed into icons and abbreviations. Every year, entire languages vanish, taking with them ways of seeing the world that can never be retrieved.
And yet, every generation insists: we are still fully human.
The Blindness of Loss
The blindness lies here: we cannot mourn what we no longer have the capacity to imagine. A society without memory arts cannot grasp the feats of memory once common in every village. A world without silence cannot fathom the depths of thought once available to those who lived in it. Children who never climb trees or wander unsupervised cannot know what kind of knowledge of themselves and of the earth has been denied them.
The greatest loss is not of things themselves, but of the awareness of loss.
AI as the Latest Fog
And now, AI.
The arrival of generative systems is already framed in the familiar language: will they replace creativity? Will they make us passive, lazy, dependent? But the deeper pattern is older than the machines themselves. AI does not represent a sudden rupture; it extends the same fog we have been walking into for centuries.
We outsource memory to databases, judgment to algorithms, perception to recommendation systems. With AI, we begin to outsource imagination itself — the ability to make, to invent, to wrestle with the slow labor of bringing something into being. What once demanded years of training, discipline, or devotion can now be simulated in seconds.
We may believe we remain creators — just as earlier generations believed themselves no weaker for abandoning the bow in favor of the gun, no less whole for abandoning the oral epic for the printed page. But slowly, invisibly, the human faculties wither. They wither not because machines take them, but because we cease to exercise them. And once gone, they disappear without trace, without even the capacity for regret.
The Vanishing Point
A century from now, people will lament again. They will say AI has finally brought them to the brink of losing their humanity. They will not realize they are already far past the brink. They will not notice that their sense of creativity, of memory, of language is narrower than ours — just as ours is narrower than those who came before. They will believe themselves whole, precisely because they will no longer be able to conceive of what wholeness once meant.
The Final Blindness
Perhaps the most haunting truth is this: humanity may vanish without us ever noticing. Not in a blaze of apocalypse, but in a slow and silent hollowing, a forgetting of what it meant to be what we were.
We will go on declaring ourselves fully human. We will go on thinking the danger lies just ahead. But what is already gone will never return — and we will no longer know enough even to grieve it.
Because to perceive the depth of our diminishment would require the very capacities that have already slipped away.
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