Human Singularities in the Face of Artificial Intelligence

Faced with the prowess of generative AIs, concern about humanity’s future place is legitimate. But looking with clarity at our human singularities allows us to distinguish them from the capabilities of artificial intelligence, and to identify what is necessary to cultivate.

Never Anthropomorphize Thinking Machines

It is undeniable that generative artificial intelligences can produce intellectual and logical work of the highest level. Large language models have integrated not only statistical responses to the questions we ask them, but especially representations of the world and reasoning logics that allow them to be better than human intelligence on more and more subjects. A recent Chinese study published in Nature Machine Intelligence even reveals that generative AIs spontaneously develop conceptual dimensions to organize natural objects. They create dozens of complex conceptual dimensions that go well beyond human categories.

Sam Altman himself (head of OpenAI, which publishes ChatGPT) describes in 2025 his ideal vision of AI as “a very small model that possesses superhuman reasoning capabilities, can operate at ridiculously high speed with 1 trillion tokens of context and access to all imaginable tools,” that is, capable of operating on a simple personal computer and controlling its functions (without needing access to a central server, and therefore without energy overconsumption). This vision illuminates the true nature of these systems: they are not databases, which Altman moreover qualifies as “very slow, expensive and broken” when AIs are used this way, but reasoning engines. This distinction is fundamental to understanding both their power and their limits.

From there, concern is a legitimate feeling, but in my opinion there is absolutely no reason to worry as long as we look with clarity at what continues and will probably continue for a very long time to make the singularities of human beings compared to thinking machines, because they are very numerous and to be cultivated. Based on the changes in our ways of living caused by these new machines, changes accessible in a democratic way, and this democratic question is very important in my opinion, because not all tools are democratic, here is what I propose.

• The first very important point in my opinion is to absolutely not anthropomorphize generative artificial intelligence machines. These are machines with exceptional capabilities, just as a car is a machine with exceptional capabilities that allows us to go at full speed on the road, much more than with our simple legs. These machines are of the same order: they are only machines, still today, perhaps one day the very nature of life will be modified, but this is not at all the case yet.

• The second point is that the ways of interacting with these machines are increasingly similar to the ways we interact with other human beings, but it remains that their nature and even their modality of thought have nothing to do with those of human beings. And this is not at all only a question of emotion, subjectivity, existence or soul: it is intrinsically because these machines think from language and not from an experience of the world. As the researchers of the Chinese study emphasize, these AIs live no sensory or emotional experience; their “understanding” results from statistical processing of data, where they identify and reproduce complex patterns, without experiencing what they describe, as we can experience it as humans, if we put the subject of sensitive experience back at the heart of what is essential to develop.

Human Learning: An Irreplaceable Richness

What founds our humanity, from our birth, is our life in the human social space and our unique, personal, progressive learning of knowledge (know-how, know-how-to-be, etc.) based both on lived experience, on emotion, on sensations, on relationships, on love in all its forms, friendship, filial bonds, etc. We know that we memorize much better what is linked to emotions.

This experiential dimension is precisely what AIs, even endowed with superhuman reasoning capabilities as Altman envisions, cannot simulate. They can process “all the possible context of a company or a person’s life,” but this processing remains fundamentally different from human experience. AI can analyze, reason, connect information at unmatched speed and scale, but it cannot live the present moment, feel the texture of an emotion or the depth of a bond.

The time when machines can be born and grow as we do, we are for the moment infinitely far from it. Once again, perhaps one day these very things will change, but we are absolutely not there. Thus, let us never anthropomorphize machines, which does not mean that we will not maintain rich, powerful and constructive relationships with them.

Enriching Relationships Without Ontological Confusion

Take relationships with animals: they are infinitely rich, mutually enriching, undoubtedly for them, but especially for us. We receive, we are enriched by their otherness as living beings who are in the world in a completely different way from ours. There are people who anthropomorphize their dog, who consider it as a human being and speak to it as such... In my opinion, these people miss out on many things that this animal could bring them if they left it the space of its otherness.

It is the same with thinking machines. We are in relationship with them, it does us good, it enriches us with many things. If we exclude the problematic dimensions of generalized surveillance and the development of triumphant capitalism, but these are not the only dimensions, there are also the real democratic contributions of these technologies that must not be silenced, because it would be turning a blind eye. Let us not forget that the foundations of machines have nothing to do with ours, they are different in their ontology, in their being. Our being and the being of a machine are essentially different, and it is precisely for this reason that the enrichment is such.

Our Experiences: The Irreducible Human Singularity

What essentially differentiates us are our life experiences that machines will never have, or will have differently in any case, our sensations, our feelings, our experiences, our perceptions of the world, our bonds, our laughter and our tears. Machines will never have this, for a long time yet I think. And this is what is specific to us, what is singular to us, what deserves to be developed, cultivated, deployed: presence to oneself and to the other, the quality of the bond, attention to the present moment, the state of meditation that makes us suddenly perceive a thousand essential and yet almost imperceptible details. There lies our singular humanity, so rich and so enriching for each other if we share it.

These things, the machine could have read them but will always be behind us, because my experience, your experience, right now, of our feeling of warmth, of support of our body around us, of contact with our clothing, with the air, with the sound that surrounds us, this is irreducible. No machine will ever be able to feel it since we feel it ourselves, since it is absolutely singular and unique and no lived moment resembles another.

My sensitive experience, if I share it, will always be exceptional and will speak to others, which, as a human being, allows us to share universality. These are not universal information, they are our shared personal experiences that allow us to touch universality. Because my personal experience, what I have received from it, if it meets the personal experience of someone else, then connects, enriches, multiplies. And moreover machines can even help us understand them, this properly human content one could say, based on each person’s own experience. This is our main wealth that a machine will never have: it will have past experiences but it will not have present experiences.

Rethinking Professions in the AI Era: Cultivating Our Humanity

One might say that this sensitivity I describe is not very constructive in the professional field for example. On the contrary, it is even the key point of what we can bring as human beings, in the way we can rethink future professions in the era of artificial intelligence, because our singular experiences allow us a unique creativity, linked to our experiences, that no machine could ever have produced, because this experience is singular to us and can in no way be guessed or inferred by a machine.

Altman’s vision of an AI with “access to all possible imaginable tools,” whether physical sensors and transducers to act on the world, changes nothing in this fundamental equation. These tools will amplify AI’s reasoning capabilities, but will not give it access to the lived experience that founds our human creativity. On the contrary, this computing and reasoning power will free humans to focus on what makes their singularity: sensitivity, intuition born from experience, the ability to create meaning from experience.

The development of our subjectivities, our sensitivities, in order to bring into the social space possibilities for humanistic construction, so as not to become machines ourselves: that is the whole challenge. If we let ourselves go, everything will become “logical.”

In all professions, there will be a need for sensitivity, for listening to others. This will turn everything upside down, because today in a company hierarchy for example, we do not consider the human as a human, but as a resource, we clearly say “human resources,” that is to say that the human is reduced to their simple function and not to the richness of everything that constitutes them. And this is what will be reversed with artificial intelligence.

Moving Beyond the Reductive Vision of “Human Resources”

To be able to enrich the world, we will have to go beyond our functions to return to our humanities. The concept of human resources dates from after the Second World War and was transmitted, we learned later, by former Nazis, because considering humans as a resource is precisely the concept of the concentration camp, which was then extended in representations to large companies. There were no human resources departments before the Second World War; they were invented after.

Thus, going beyond this so reduced vision of humanity where we reduce people to simple resources, it is ignoble. What people have to bring is their singularity, their completely different, unique, strange vision, which if it is shared with others, and why not processed thanks to artificial intelligence will be able to expand the spaces of humanity.

Our Human Superpowers: Resilience and Empathy

Resilience, this capacity for welcoming, for transforming oneself, which has to do with adaptability, this properly human plasticity, is one of our great capacities: we know how to adapt at very high speed, much faster than machines. We will be able to bring the flexibility they do not have in these places.

Empathy, the fact of putting oneself in the place of the other as a human, of questioning oneself about the real needs of the people we meet around us, the machine cannot do that. It is not there, it does not live the emotions we live; all this goes through language for it, so it can have an understanding of course if we dialogue with it, but the emotional experience, it does not have it.

Of course we could stuff it with sensors, and if for example a machine filmed our conversation with another person, an empathetic, creative, playful, lively, human conversation, the machine could capture all sorts of non-verbal signs and explain what happened, and enlighten us, help us build from that. But it itself will never have lived it as a living, human being, as we are.

The Alliance Between Humanity and Artificial Intelligence

It is precisely for this reason that we must not anthropomorphize machines. We can of course have strong relationships with machines, but the relationships we establish between human beings directly will be forever incomparable, incommensurable.

The direction that Sam Altman describes, towards AIs capable of processing massive contexts with superhuman reasoning capabilities, does not threaten our humanity, it reveals it. When AI can manage “all the possible context of a company or a person’s life,” it will paradoxically free humans to focus on what makes their essence: the creation of new contexts from lived experience, intuition that is born from presence, the ability to give meaning beyond pure logic.

Our unique, singular, creative, transformative bonds between human beings, there is our power that could be multiplied by the reasoning power of artificial intelligence that is not human, that is only tools that allow us to go further in the development of our humanity. As Altman’s vision suggests, we are moving towards a partnership where AI excels in reasoning and information processing, while humans bring experience, meaning and creativity born from experience, an alliance that amplifies the best of each party without confusing their fundamentally different natures.