On Becoming Human: Empathy, Responsibility, and the Mirror of AI

What might it look like, to design AI applications to collaborate with and support humans, rather than to replace us? How might accepting the need for limits and boundaries, help us humans mature as a species? And what would it mean, to step into our collective responsibilities toward one another, and to the larger web of life on Earth? This essay is informed by Karol Soltan’s extension of care ethics to political philosophy, and his understanding of maturity as the “marriage between the rational and the sacred”. How might Soltan’s warning of the dangers of the “return of the repressed”, help us understand modernity’s race toward self-annihilation in its devotion to the Gods of Endless Profit? And what other touchstones for co-creating shared paths forward might we find, as we go around the circle and listen to other voices and visions of the future?