AI: The Falsity of Comparison

In the Vajrayana tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Tukdam is a meditative state said to continue after clinical death. The practitioner, despite having died, appears to remain in deep meditation, the body retaining a lifelike appearance with minimal decomposition for days or even weeks. Researchers are only beginning to study it. The questions it raises remain wide open.

We have been trying to understand what a human being is for a very long time. And we're still not there.

Which is why the conversation around AI and humanity has always struck me as starting in the wrong place. Most of what gets written on this subject, whether alarming or reassuring, arrives at the same premise. It takes something distinctly human, intelligence, creativity, empathy, sensory experience, holds it up against what AI can or cannot do, and draws a conclusion. What we rarely stop to ask is whether that comparison makes sense in the first place.

I don't think it does.

When we ask what humans can do that AI can't, we've already conceded something important. We've accepted a framing that reduces being human to a capability set. A checklist of features to be defended or surrendered one by one. By that logic, every time AI acquires a new capability, humanity loses a little ground. And the logical endpoint of that argument is a contest nobody can win cleanly.

Consider a simple thought experiment. Imagine AI develops olfactory capability and can genuinely smell the world around it. Does that make it more human? Instinctively most of us would say no. But if we're honest, we struggle to articulate exactly why. And that struggle is revealing. It suggests the capabilities were never really the point. We keep moving the goalposts because the goalposts were never in the right place to begin with.

Part of what makes this comparison so precarious is that we don't fully understand either side of it. Human consciousness, cognition and learning remain among the deepest open questions in science and philosophy. We don't have a complete account of what subjective experience actually is or where thinking ends and feeling begins. But what rarely gets acknowledged is that AI is equally opaque. These are systems we built and still cannot fully explain. So we find ourselves comparing two unknowns, with great confidence, and declaring a winner. That's not analysis. It's anxiety dressed up as argument.

There's also something worth sitting with about the framework itself. Human experience is analog, continuous, contradictory and irreducibly complex. It doesn't resolve into categories cleanly. We contain multitudes simultaneously and inseparably. Imposing a binary framework onto that, better or worse, more or less human, misrepresents the thing being measured before the measurement even begins.

My own view is that we've been here before, many times, and we keep forgetting it. Every significant technology in human history arrived accompanied by the fear that it would diminish us. The printing press would make memory obsolete. Photography would kill painting. The internet would end deep thought. None of that happened. What actually happened was that each new medium became an extension of human expression rather than its replacement. A new surface through which the same irreducible human experience could travel.

Digital is no different. It is not a separate world encroaching on the physical one. It is an extension of it. And AI is the latest chapter in that same story. Not a competitor to humanity but a medium through which humanity continues to express, extend and examine itself.

The question I find more interesting is not who wins this imagined contest. It's why we keep framing it as one. Because as long as we see AI as an adversary, we're not really talking about AI at all. We're talking about our own anxiety about what makes us matter. And that's a human question that no comparison with a machine was ever going to answer.

Perhaps the most generative thing we can do right now is resist the pull of that framing entirely. Not because the question of human value isn't worth asking, it absolutely is. But because the answer was most likely not going to be found in the comparison itself.