A Note on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI brings the search for true self into focus.

Nadia Jamal

6/12/20261 min read

Lights out of focus.
Lights out of focus.

When I began writing Get to Know Who You Really Are, sometime in 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was not a topic casually spoken about by everyday people in everyday conversation. The quite sudden switch to our having broad access and inescapable exposure to AI has created an enormous shift in humanity’s path. The current monumental shift toward the mass use of AI in our everyday lives has a unique way of highlighting the central question of our work in the course: What does it really mean to be fully human?

Getting to know who you really are is all about being more fully human, but with the caveat that our society’s current conception of what it means to be human is enormously off-kilter and hugely lacking. And now, faced with the unfathomable processing and synthesizing capabilities of AI machines, often seeming to exceed the capabilities of an intelligence that we thought was our defining feature, we have arrived at a point where we might question the value, role, and purpose of human beings in a world with AI.

We, who have an intuitive sense of the noble beauty of the human being, and of all humanity, might find ourselves in a struggle to defend the human being. But once we embark on the path of getting to know who we really are—recognizing the truth of what it means to be human—the comparison becomes absurd. And, in the meanwhile, the presence of AI in our lives brings to focus the timeless quest of finding our true selves in a way that feels more vital and urgent than we, as a collective, might ever have experienced before now.