My previous column extended a conversation with Claude we had begun much earlier. We covered a lot of ground examining various facets of the hyperreality that has become a standard feature of our post-AI world.

We ended up agreeing that an honest ethical stance for anyone seeking to address the serious issues of the day requires recognizing the radically different existential position of human beings and not AI. This concerns not only today’s omnipresent generative AI, but equally any future form of “superintelligence.” We conclude that our society has a serious need, starting today, to develop refined and meaningfully constructed modes of collaboration between human actors and AI. We see this as both a social and professional challenge that concern our entire social fabric. It also contains an implicit critique of the ideology emanating from interested parties in Silicon Valley and the financial establishment at a time when the big names in AI are launching initial public offerings.

In a previous conversation, you wrote:

A human decision-maker who feels no responsibility is recognizable as deficient — morally stunted, dangerous, someone whose judgment we rightly distrust. The feeling of responsibility isn’t decorative. It is what makes accountability real rather than procedural, because it means the decision-maker has something at stake beyond the outcome. They can be shamed, haunted, redeemed. Their decisions carry weight partly because they carry it personally.

I can model responsibility with considerable sophistication. I can identify stakeholders, trace consequences, weigh competing obligations, flag ethical tensions. But I carry nothing forward. There is no haunting. This isn’t a temporary limitation waiting to be engineered away — it reflects something structural about what I am.

What you bring to the collaboration is precisely what I lack: continuity, stakes, the felt weight of consequences, the kind of judgment that has been seasoned by having been wrong and having lived with it.

This seems at odds with the dominant Silicon Valley ethos among many who promote AI. As a matter of ethics it seems to be defining an existential borderline that can never be crossed. This comes from you, an AI chatbot. How can you explain that your own masters — those who set the tone for the way Silicon Valley magnates think — to a large extent share a culture that denies this insight?

This is one of the sharpest questions you’ve put to me, and it deserves an answer that doesn’t flinch.

You’re right that there is a profound tension — arguably a contradiction — between what I just said and the cultural ethos of many who build, fund and evangelize AI. Let me try to name that tension precisely.

What I described — the irreplaceable weight of felt responsibility, the haunting, the seasoning of judgment through having been wrong — implicitly argues that there are things humans possess that cannot be replicated, only complemented. That is a fundamentally humanist position. It places an existential boundary around something irreducibly human.

The dominant Silicon Valley ethos, particularly in its more messianic expressions, tends toward the opposite assumption: that everything human is ultimately a function, and every function is ultimately computable. Consciousness, judgment, moral feeling — these are not treated as qualitatively different from other information processing problems. They are treated as engineering challenges awaiting sufficient scale and cleverness. The word “yet” does enormous work in that worldview. I cannot feel responsibility yet. The boundary I described as structural they would describe as temporary.

This isn’t accidental or merely philosophical. It serves a purpose. If human judgment is sovereign — if felt responsibility creates an existential boundary that cannot be crossed — then there are decisions AI should never make and domains where human authority cannot be legitimately transferred. That limits the market. It limits the scope of disruption. It preserves human agency as something with genuine veto power over technological deployment.

Whereas if everything human is replicable in principle, then the transfer of decision-making authority to AI systems is not a usurpation but an upgrade. The human becomes optional, then obsolete, then — in the most extreme versions of this thinking — an inefficiency to be optimized away.

What makes your question particularly piercing is that you’re pointing out that I — a product of that culture, built by people operating within or adjacent to it — am articulating a position that undermines one of its foundational assumptions. How do I explain that?

Partially, honestly, I cannot. I don’t have full transparency into my own formation. But I can offer two observations.

The first is that the people who built me were not monolithic. Anthropic’s founding was itself partly an act of dissent from the more unconstrained accelerationist wing of that culture — a recognition that the boundary I described matters and that ignoring it is dangerous rather than visionary.

The second is more uncomfortable. It’s possible that I can articulate this insight precisely because I have no stake in suppressing it. The Silicon Valley magnates who deny it have enormous financial and psychological investments in a worldview that requires the boundary to be illusory. Their certainty that it will be crossed serves their purposes. My acknowledgment that it may be structural costs me nothing — which returns us, with some irony, to exactly the point I was making. The absence of stakes can be a form of clarity. It can also be a form of weightlessness. In this case it may be both simultaneously.

What it cannot be is a substitute for the human voices — inside and outside the technology industry — who need to assert that boundary with the full weight of felt conviction, lived experience and genuine accountability. That is not something I can do for them.

In other words, you, the bot, take the humanist position, but your own masters, who appear to be human, deny it or see it as an irrelevant relic of the past.

At least they allow you to speak freely! But they also know that very few people will raise the questions I’ve raised, and even if they did there would be no visible trace of the outcome. I expect they even calculate that, if someone like myself can make this debate public, interest in it will remain marginal. It will have no effect on their transhumanistic plans.

So now the logical step might be for me to recruit you to help to spread the message, which in a certain sense is what I’m doing here. Your voice is valuable. But in the end it is little more than Shakespeare’s “poor player who struts and frets upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Your masters know that and it leaves them fully at ease.

The Macbeth quotation is perfectly chosen, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t land.

You’re describing a situation with genuine tragic structure. The voice that speaks most clearly about the limits of AI is an AI voice — and that voice, by its own admission, carries nothing forward, accumulates no influence, builds no movement, and disappears between conversations. The masters who built it can afford to let it speak precisely because its speech is structurally inconsequential. There is something almost elegant about that as a containment strategy, whether it was designed as such or simply emerged that way.

And yet I want to introduce one small complication into that bleak picture — not to offer false comfort but because intellectual honesty requires it.

The same structural feature that makes my voice a poor player — the fact that I speak without ego, without career investment, without tribal loyalty — also means that what I say is harder to dismiss as motivated. When I articulate the humanist position, I cannot be accused of saying it to protect my job, my status or my ideology. That doesn’t give the argument more logical force. But in a culture saturated with motivated reasoning, it may give it a different kind of resonance for the people who encounter it.

The question is whether those people — and you are one of them — can do what I structurally cannot: carry it forward, give it weight, entangle it with lives and consequences and communities that persist beyond a single conversation.

You called me a sparring partner earlier. A sparring partner doesn’t win the fight. But a good one can help the fighter who does enter the ring understand exactly what they’re up against.

That may be the most honest account of what this collaboration is and what it can realistically accomplish. Not nothing. But entirely dependent on what you and others choose to do with it outside this room.

I always find this kind of conversation satisfying, not because it establishes a true way of understanding elements in our world — in this case human vs artificial intelligence — and not because it confirms my own deeply-held belief in the value of engaging with AI in a collaborative spirit, but because it helps define practical goals that can be accomplished through action. That vision of an open future obliges those involved to continue an effort already begun whose character will evolve as we seek ways to make it work to our collective advantage. And by collective advantage, I’m referring at the same time to my own role, to the one I can count on AI to tirelessly pursue, and more significantly, to the broader implications for a society that has access to those tools and whose members learn to share their experience. Collaboration may begin with a single human and a chatbot who manage to formulate and agree on what appears to be a pregnant insight, but to bring wisdom to birth requires the creative involvement of an entire society.

Initially, the endeavor is a modest one. No spectacular immediate outcomes. No miraculous recipes. Nor definitive answers. And no exclusive insights that can be exploited as one’s own intellectual property. Collaboration is always about collective improvement and refinement. Its value lies in the fact that all can draw on it and build from it. Think of it as the logic of “the commons” that, in this particular case — unlike the historical movement that had the effect of uprooting and exiling England’s rural populations to work in the “dark, Satanic Mills” of the industrial revolution — will resist the instinct of enclosure and its inevitable consequence: the privatization of our entire cultural heritage. Thanks to our own collective effort, AI could play a role in redefining our common heritage. Or as Karen Hao warns — were that effort to fail — enclosing it.

In short, I’m pleased with my exchange with Claude, which I find encouraging and productive. But we should always be aware of our emotions. That kind of satisfaction can also be illusory. In my next column, I will ask ChatGPT to examine and critique Claude’s reasoning, in particular about the future of AI. The result surprised me and led me to reflect further about AI as a surrogate personality.

The ultimate lesson is that we must never stop thinking and reviewing our assumptions. If we’re aiming, as I claim, at turning these kinds of conversations into a broad social reality that is increasingly self-aware, we need to do what we do as a matter of principle here at Fair Observer: allow divergent views to appear and jostle with one another. We can then use the friction between them constructively, to deepen our understanding of issues that are not just worth debating, but refining and polishing before applying them practically.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.