Some human qualities will never scale, no matter how powerful technology gets. As AI capabilities compound, the human remains stubbornly fixed.
There is much exciting technology going on, like the work in biology (neuroscience, longevity, etc). We’re seeing signs that we can read people’s minds and telepathically communicate.
Regardless, some laws of biology still apply. You physically cannot be in two places at once. The ratio and gap of agent-to-human might continue to grow, but a singular human doesn’t grow or duplicate the way an AI or cell does.
These aren’t meant to be permanent or naysayer statements that counter what AI can and cannot do. Many constraints in today’s processes and systems will disappear- just some faster than others. But some things resist that logic entirely. You cannot automate the moment a friendship deepens. You cannot scale the weight of your doctor looking you in the eye and delivering news. The process matters beyond the output.
Despite some fixed components in biology, overall improvements made to the quality of life have also increased life expectancy to help us maximize this potential: lower infant mortality rates, better medicine, less disease, fewer wars*, better policies, etc. But we still have a very long way to go. When deployed right, AI will democratize discoveries and treatments we've never had access to before.
An example is a human relationship. For one, the inclusion of AI is being introduced into texting, drafting responses, scheduling tasks, etc. To be clear, AI does expand parts of this. It can help us maintain more relationships—remember birthdays, suggest replies, surface context we would otherwise forget. In that sense, it stretches our social bandwidth.
But the 1:1 actual human relationship cannot be formed with an upwards scale of agents cold emailing humans, or God forbid, each other. At any given point in time, we can probably name 150 people who are in our circles. Genuine connection requires presence, attention, and stakes, none of which can be copy-pasted or compressed.
But hasn’t technology always been here? Yes, but the human is still present. In fields like music production, we’ve been using technology like autotune, production software, and sampling. But we follow artists because of who they are, not what tools they use, even if they go out of tune. Nobody is buying tickets to stan a model inference.
While technology can help better facilitate certain parts of these relationships (e.g.: with technology, you can connect with more people! A list of 150 people now can become 1000 in your notes), non-scalable human relationships will stay the same. Time, as we humans know and perceive it, is fixed. You cannot simultaneously have a one-on-one with five people. Our energy and time are also limited to 24 hours a day -- at least on planet earth. We can do and automate things, offload work, and create services that will help us save or “buy back” time, but no, the 24 hours and human energy and basic biological need for rest remain.
The same goes for physical, emotional, and spiritual growth. The human takes time. Nothing will replace real-life experience and toil, regardless of how much we can offload to a machine. Sure, a thousand paper summaries can save our time, but then we haven’t done the long, silent thinking for ourselves of the papers we asked an AI to summarize for us. Nothing will replace that human work, at least not yet. An AI can hand you ten years of summarized knowledge in ten minutes. What it cannot hand you is the ten years.
And we can’t rush the accumulation of experience. We don’t push an infant into the role of a white-collar office job at the time of birth, no? One must first grow their teeth, learn to walk, and learn, among other things. I couldn’t have been handed a stack of resources and responsibility on day one and simply absorbed it. I had to face problems, toy around, suffer (type II fun), and learn from consequences and feedback from some of my bad decisions.
This might prove unsatisfying for the reader to hear, but I don’t think the answer is to “future-proof” yourself from imminent powerful technology. That framing assumes a threat to outrun. Most fields' next steps will result in AI extending human capabilities. Some qualities are not meant to be — and will fail — to be replaced. We will, in some ways, converge with technology; in other ways, we will stay fiercely independent. Regardless, the slow accumulation of lived experience, the weight of real relationships, and the private struggle of growth will stay - they were never on the table to begin with.
Side note: Besides occasional experiments with voice dictation tools, my raw writing speed (no AI usage - all these are raw thoughts!) is not scalable, either. What has changed: em dashes. I used to write in em dashes throughout high school, and now I purposefully try for hyphens to clarify that I am indeed human.