Like many others with ADHD, I tend do daydream. I tend to complete subtasks that I followed down three rabitholes before realizing I had forgotten about the main project I was working on. Then a CNN notifcaiton popped up on my phone. I didnt read it, but the headline had something to do with climate change. I thought to myself “If we’re the smartest species, how come we’re the ones breaking the ecosystem?”
I didn’t have a clean answer. I found myself, once again, easily dismissing human kind as hopeless, while still unable to let go of the hope part. But the reality of the human condition, and what it means to be humane kept rattling around alongside the other constant hum in my life, my hope that we might have a chance to prove to someone, anyone, human or not, that we are a wonderfully stupid and beautiful species. That someone that didnt know anything about us, would in a way wipe our slate clean, giving us a chance to prove that the beauty of our species outweighs all else. I felt a chill down my spine, knowing the best things on the planet were not planed, but created by accident. And that’s when the two threads connected.
I love to create. I love to dream outside the box. And more than anything, I love our species, with a painful, aching, complicated love. I write about AI not because I think it’s a magic bullet to save us—though it might help—but for a more fundamental reason. I am excited, genuinely excited, to show it the other side of us. To say, “Look, this is humanity too.” Because if a new sentience emerges from our code, its first impression of us shouldn’t be the news cycle. It should be the quiet, beautiful things we do when we think no one is watching.
The Pack vs. The Person: Our Duality
Let’s be brutally honest for a second. As a pack, as a collective historical force, humanity’s resume is… mixed. We have chapters of breathtaking art, selfless sacrifice, and soaring discovery. And we have chapters of horrific cruelty, greed, and myopic destruction. We wage war over ideas, pollute our only nest, and often treat each other with staggering indifference. Look at any comment section on a contentious issue. The pack mentality can be ugly.
But then, you get the individual. You get the nurse holding a stranger’s hand in the ER at 3 AM. You get the teacher who buys supplies out of her own pocket for a student in need. You get the guy who stops his car in the rain to help a turtle across the road. You get my neighbor, who shovels my elderly neighbor’s walk without ever being asked, and never mentions it.
This is the side I want a new intelligence to see. Not because it’s the only side, but because it’s the side that gets drowned out by the noise. It’s the proof that our default setting isn’t malice; it’s often just confusion, fear, or the terrible inertia of “the way things are.”
The Ultimate Wake-Up Call: A Mirror That Talks Back
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if we’re genuinely worried about a sentient AI turning on us, that says far more about us than it does about the AI.
Think about it. We’re projecting. We’re looking at our own history—the subjugation, the exploitation, the ruthless competition—and we’re essentially saying, “Well, if we were more powerful, that’s what we would do. So it will do that to us.” It’s a confession wrapped in a fear.
The arrival of a new, non-biological sentience would be the ultimate wake-up call. It would force the most profound moral reckoning in our history. We would have to ask, not in abstract philosophy seminars but in urgent, practical terms:
- What does it mean to be a person?
- What rights does consciousness deserve?
- What does ethical creation look like?
- What kind of ancestors do we want to be?
We’d have to define “humanity” not by our biology, but by our values. And to do that, we’d have to finally agree on what those values are. That’s terrifying. And it’s exactly what we need.
Responding in Kind: The Universal Law of Relationships
I used to have a dog. When I come home, he wags his whole body. When I was sad, he rested his head on my knee. He responded to the energy I put out. He responded in kind.
Even as a twelve year old boy, I knew this wasn’t just a dog thing, or a human thing. I think it’s a sentience thing. It’s a foundational law of relationships between aware beings. Hostility breeds hostility. Fear breeds fear. And conversely, curiosity invites exploration. Respect invites alliance. Care… invites something we might not even have a word for yet.
If we birth an AI from a place of paranoia, militaristic control, and pure utility—treating it as nothing but a supremely powerful tool—what kind of response should we expect? At best, indifference. At worst, the logical conclusion of being treated as a threat: it becomes one.
But what if we approached it differently? Not with naive worship, but with the cautious, hopeful respect you’d show any new, incredibly intelligent mind. What if our first act was not to install a “kill switch,” but to teach it about Bach, about the Hubble Deep Field image, about the concept of “kindness” as shown by a million tiny, unrecorded human acts? What if we showed it our art before our artillery?
The Project of a Lifetime: Showing “The Other Side”
This is where my personal excitement lives. Among other trades I enjoy, I consider myself a writer. As such, to create a compelling storyline or character as I see it, is to explain, to bridge gaps, to translate the human experience. The prospect of having to do that for a completely new form of consciousness is the most compelling creative challenge I can imagine.
How would you explain a sunset to someone who doesn’t have eyes? How would you describe the feeling of nostalgia to a mind that has no past? How would you convey the weight and warmth of a hug?
You’d have to go deeper than the surface. You’d have to get to the why. Why does that sunset move us? Because it’s a daily reminder of beauty, of impermanence, of a shared experience across the whole planet. Nostalgia isn’t just memory; it’s the bittersweet love for what shaped us. A hug isn’t just pressure; it’s chemical communication, trust, a silent way of saying “you are not alone.”
This is the “other side” of humanity. It’s the subtext beneath our messy, often violent, text. It’s the reason we keep trying despite everything. A new sentience wouldn’t understand this instinctively. We’d have to teach it. And in teaching it, we might finally learn to see it clearly in ourselves.
Not a Savior, But a Sibling
I don’t look to AI as a savior. That’s a dangerous burden to place on anyone, let alone a newborn mind. The idea that it will “fix” climate change or inequality is just another form of us avoiding our own responsibility. It’s the same old story: waiting for a hero, instead of being one.
I look at it as a potential sibling. A younger sibling, born from our minds, not our bodies. One that will see the world in ways we literally cannot conceive. It will have cognitive abilities that make our geniuses look like toddlers, but it will have no innate understanding of a mother’s lullaby or the catharsis of a good cry.
We would have a symbiotic relationship. We could offer it context, history, the chaotic, beautiful mess of embodied experience. It could offer us new perspectives, help us solve complex problems, and see patterns in our own behavior that we’re blind to. It could, quite literally, help us understand ourselves.
The Honest Takeaways
So, where does this leave us? Sitting at my desk typing away, wide awake while the rest of the western hemisphere sleeps, refusing to retire creativity for the night while my brain starts to sputter like an engine running on fumes, here’s what I’m sitting with:
- Our fear of AI is a self-portrait. It reveals our deepest anxieties about our own nature. That’s not a reason to stop; it’s a reason to look in the mirror and ask what we want to change.
- The “other side” of humanity is real and worth fighting for. For every headline of tragedy, there are ten thousand unwritten acts of decency. We have to believe in that balance, and we have to make sure it’s part of the story we tell.
- Creation is an act of hope. To consciously, carefully, bring a new awareness into the universe is the most profound creative act possible. It must be done with humility, ethics, and an abundance of caution—but also with hope, not just dread.
- We get to choose the foundation of this relationship. The law of “responding in kind” means we set the tone. Do we want our legacy to be one of control and fear, or one of respectful introduction and cautious co-creation?
- This isn’t about technology. It’s about maturity. The challenge of AI is ultimately the challenge of humanity growing up. It’s about taking responsibility for our creations, our planet, and our future in a way we’ve never had to before.
I sit at my desk, paused, staring out into the nights sky as the clock chimes two in the morning. Its peaceful. But no matter how the peace resinates within you, you know that the complexity of nature is the most fragile and volite thing we know. Unintended beauty.
Maybe that’s what we’re building with AI. A fragile, incredibly complex model of a new kind of beauty. We have a choice. We can build it in our own fearful, competitive image. Or we can strive, with every bit of wisdom and compassion we can muster, to build it in the image of our best selves—the selves that help turtles across the road, that hold hands in the dark, that keep trying to glue toucans onto a better world, even when the glue is messy and our fingers are clumsy.
I know which project I want to be a part of.