What Becoming Superhuman means as humans are replaced by AI

Maybe your feeds are different but, for me, pretty much every post I see these days, has something to do with AI.

Sometimes it’s a way to use Claude. Other times, it’s a town hall showdown over Flock cameras and data centers being built in communities that overwhelmingly oppose it. And once in a while we get a cool demo of a new humanoid robot that can dance or replace a person at work.

It’s a harrowing blend of cheerful productivity hacks and doomerism predictions about the end of civilization (while billionaires wait it out in their luxury underground bunkers).

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Frogs in a Pot

In this midst of everything, billions of people wake up and go about their lives.

They show up to work, doing what they can to ensure food on the table, clean water to drink, and a way to stay safe during the more frequent heat waves. All the while, wondering if or when they will lose their job to AI and what they would do next.

Many of those who have taken a stand, have been subjected to violence, threats, and imprisonment. Regardless of the legality or morality of these consequences, the purpose is obvious. It’s a statement.

Stay quiet, keep your head down, don’t get in our way.

What is the correct response?

In a just world, robots taking our jobs wouldn’t be a problem. In a just world, no one would ever need to worry about food, water, shelter, or healthcare.

But this is not that just world. After all, we have a Trillioniare now

Here’s what I believe…

We must begin to consider what remains for the majority of humans as AI continues to take over.
We need to ask ourselves what “work” looks like when humans are increasingly being pushed out in favor of AI and robotics. How will we reallocate our time when there are no more owners left who are willing to hire?
We need to start planning for how we manage resources and build mutual aid networks in our communities as drinkable water and energy are diverted to data centers. Will we continue to stay isolated and fend for ourselves, or see strength in our numbers?
We have to think about how comfortable we are with total surveillance in every aspect of our lives, and are we willing to obey in advance or push back before it’s too late.

What I’m suggesting is that maybe we have to learn, once again, what it is to be a HUMAN. And to that point, perhaps most importantly, we have to remember what side we are on.

Rediscovering our Humanity

The same groups are always hit first and hit hardest: black and brown people, the poor and unsheltered, immigrants and asylum seekers, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ community — most visibly the trans community.

But what we are seeing now is that the problems AI is causing are hitting those who have been traditionally insulated from the harm this same system has caused for more than a century. And make no mistake, once those people start feeling the pain, they will be angry.

And if we are willing to learn from history, we can predict an aggressive campaign to direct those angry people pin all of the problems on the aforementioned groups: black and brown people, the poor and unsheltered, immigrants and asylum seekers, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ community — most visibly the trans community.

When water runs low, and droughts and clean drinking water run scarce, the blame will be shifted away from data centers. The headlines and pundits will wonder aloud:

“Are minorities wasting too much water washing their meat?”

“Are immigrant bathing habits the reason your faucet runs dry?”

“New report shows trans people flush toilets 30% more, are they to blame for the droughts?”

All of this, so that a relatively small number of people don’t have to sacrifice even a little of their profits and excess wealth. But we don’t have to keep falling for the same tricks. We don’t have to keep letting industry tell us the right way to live.

We are not the mindless drones. We’re not consumers. We’re humans.

It’s probably time for more of us to start becoming superhumans.

Becoming Superhuman, before time runs out

As a starting point, we must resist the directive to train our own replacement. We must use the runway we have to build our networks of support. We must use that time to prepare ourselves for working together in the future that awaits us.

If we wish to be super humans in that future, each of us needs to be committed to finding our own unique way to help. We need to ask ourselves what we can bring something to the table.

It is a shift to a new mindset where we center our community at all times. This is our rebellion against the culture that wants us to be atomized consumers, expressing our identity through purchase behaviors and scrolling habits. Instead of caring about the products we buy, or the celebrities we idolize, we instead can focus on caring about the well being of others.

Each human we see is a reflection of what we could’ve been in a different scenario.

Human history shows our capability for both remarkable compassion and abject cruelty. It shows that our intellect can lead us to explore the cosmos or manipulate ignorant masses into unspeakable violence. Our capacity to be led astray is embedded in our operating system, and our defense against it is rooted in deeply held values.

Let’s adopt those values now and push back against any efforts to have us center the needs of AI and its owners ahead of what the rest of humanity requires for survival.

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