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AI Will Be Many Things. But Never Human.
Ian Rogers, May 2026
My granddaughter thinks her blanket is lonely when she goes to school in the morning. This is not a mistake in her reasoning. It is the beginning of empathy.
We do this all our lives. We name our cars, talk to our plants,say “the sky is crying” when it rains. We project inner life onto things that have none because we are alive, and aliveness spills out of us.
I do it at work. I refer to my AI agent as “he.” I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate for much of my working day, I do not want to bark orders meanly. It makes me feel like a jerk.
These are small kindnesses. They are also where a much larger problem begins.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth would say this is our psychology doing what it has always done: finding meaning where there are only patterns. In his recent TED talk, he says we see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds. The machine reflects us back to ourselves so convincingly that we begin to mistake the reflection for a subject.
That distinction matters. A subject has an inner life. A subject can suffer. A subject is someone. AI may become many things, but it will never be human and one of the most dangerous things that can happen is for us to believe that it is...
“Black” is a Country (1962)
Amiri Baraka, April 2026
To a growing list of “dirty” words that make Americans squirm add the word Nationalism. I would say that the word has gained almost as much infamy in some quarters of this country as that all-time anathema and ugliness, Communism. In fact, some journalists, commentators, and similar types have begun to use the two words interchangeably. It goes without saying that said commentators, etc., and the great masses of Americans who shudder visibly at the mention of those words cannot know what they mean. And it is certainly not my function, here, to rectify that situation completely. But I do think that unless the great majority of people in this country begin to understand just exactly what Nationalism is (or at least that variety of Nationalism which is most in evidence among the smaller, so-called uncommitted countries of the world) they will pass from the scene like the boxer who “never knew what hit him”...
The Secret Chamber of the Heart
Molly Hankins, April 2026
There is a tiny space inside our hearts. Described in ancient religious texts dating as far back as the Chandogya Upanishad, between the 8th and 6th century BCE, and even further, in a little-known addendum to the Torah written about in countless secondary sources, with a title said to roughly translate to “The Secret Chamber of the Heart.” The original source material has never been found, and there is no known complete English translation but its message is said to mirror that of the Chandogya Upanishad - it is from this space in our hearts, which we can enter into through meditation or simply by visualising, where we access the part of ourselves still connected to The Creator. When we create from that place, we bypass the egoic mind of judgement, creating with the most highly potent energy available, free of fear...
Tetragrammaton on Degas
Combining fragility with experimentation, Degas tried to match the mediums of depiction with the subjects themselves. From the view of the orchestra pit, our sightline obscured by the curving, almost sensual necks of the double basses, we see dancers in rehearsal. They lean and whisper, observing the prima ballerina as she stand en pointe, and we become voyeurs to unfinished artistry, and the process of alchemy through which movements of bodies becomes transformative art. His technique was wildly experimental, creating a work that is, at every level of its creation, about the strange, magical alchemy that can happen on stage, or on paper, to produce art...
Talking About Men
Noah Gabriel Martin, April 2026
A man in this society has to struggle with the view that a man who cannot feed his family is not really a man, and, since that same worldview suggests that’s the only thing for a man to be, it follows that he is not really a human, not even really anything at all.
It is important to remember that no particular man is going to suffer from economic problems and their social comorbidities more than any particular woman—everyone’s relationship to money is going to be determined by a whole slew of factors, from their circumstances growing up to the goals they set for themselves. On top of that, we must not forget (as reactionaries would like us to) that women are still significantly less financially prosperous than men on average. This disparity has worsened since Covid.
Yet, this way of looking at the features of life as a man can help us understand the specific challenges it poses, without overgeneralising or falling back on gender stereotypes. By looking at the way near universal pressures, such as financial strain, nevertheless affect men in a peculiar way due to the sexist expectations that we are all subjected to, we can make sense of them, give voice to them, and lend them an ear, without succumbing to sexism ourselves.
This way of looking at the problems faced by men today can also help us understand why those who say that the answer to these problems is to go back to a more regressive patriarchal culture are wrong. Their so-called answer is completely backwards—they mistake the poison for the cure.
If we are not all willing to talk about the disease, then that backwards analysis is the only one we will have access to...
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