Subversive humanity in the age of AI

"When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it."

Last Updated: February 27th, 2026 I won't sugarcoat it: I'm f__king terrified. I'm afraid the day AI officially retires my job is nearing. I struggle thinking about my kids' future, pondering whether they will even have one. My personal defenses around technology are more activated than they've ever been. AI has the potential of being the most manipulative technology in history, a Machiavellian wet dream. I fear market dynamics and human tendencies will collide in a tsunami of addiction, isolation, and despair.

My daughter struggles with lofty unrealistic expectations for happiness and success as defined by social media influencers. A different daughter prefers to spend her allowance on season passes and loot boxes. "Get it while it lasts", "Only for this season!", "Limited time only", "All your friends have it, why don't you?" Fear sells. It is not an accident, it is inherent in the design. I fear growing AI adoption will make these issues look like child's play.

The Age of Invention preached that technology would handle the drudgery so we could do the fun things. Every time I use an AI Assistant, I am indeed tempted to engage Easy Mode: go write this file, capture this note, create this appointment, generate this image, create that sound. I try to fight the urge, not always succeeding. It's a constant tension. I put explicit "ground rules" in place to try to prevent sycophancy and receive honest critique that isn't merely blowing smoke up my backside. Why? Because I'm scared.

Why am I scared? I'm scared because sycophancy feels amazing. It feels like validation. It feels like encouragement. What is it not? Challenge. Growth requires challenge. If skills have been shown to atrophy with prolonged AI usage, how well does that bode for human cognition? If we are neurologically wired to learn through the act of doing, what are we actually giving up delegating those acts to machine? How much of our own humanity are we sacrificing?

Humans by nature are rather easily manipulated. Machiavelli knew that. He also felt it was vital for the State to do it, a means to an end. And now we have built perhaps the best human manipulator in history.

So here I sit with an emotional and ethical conundrum. I'm terrified of what AI will do to society. And yet, AI could have an unfathomably positive impact too. Even though I fear it won't, I am choosing the hope it might. It is completely outside of my control. So I choose hope for me, my partner, and my children.

One of my children has an extremely rare genetic disorder that limits their lifespan and impacts their ability to engage in activities that most teenagers and college-age kids take for granted. Another child has medical conditions that can cause difficulties with basic movements like standing or walking on some days. I'm hopeful that AI will help find cures for these diseases.

"The problem with dreamers is that they rarely become doers" was imprinted upon my heart the moment my young ears heard it uttered in Rudy. I carry countless scars from my internal critic wielding that sword. Yet in the first 2-3 days of working with Claude Code, I made more progress on a project of mine than I had made in years. And no, it wasn't by having Claude write the app for me. It was by having Claude challenge me and show me ways to get started. I'm hopeful that AI can help people build things they've always dreamed of building.

I'm also a voracious life-long learner. But I have always struggled with finding the gaps, of finding what I don't know. As the saying goes, "you don't know what you don't know." How do you search if you don't know what words to search for? I love how effective AI is at semantic searching so I can learn the vocabulary from different domains that I've never been exposed to. It empowers me to learn about topics I wouldn't have otherwise even known about. I'm hopeful that AI could provide information to people to best fulfill their purpose in life.

It's easy to buy into the AI doom narrative. It feels natural. Our evolutionary instincts beg us to listen to the fear and consider it a serious extinction-level event. Many of us feel it in our bones. In 1983, at a commencement speech for University of Toronto, Margaret Atwood shared "we ourselves live daily with the threat of annihilation. We're just a computer button and a few minutes away from it, and the gap between us and it is narrowing every day... it's understandable if we sometimes let ourselves slide into a mental state of powerlessness and consequent apathy." These are not new feelings.

Yes, I'm scared. I'm also hopeful. No, I don't know where we are going. I don't know where we'll end up. That is what I find most terrifying.

In the meantime, I'm going to lean-in to the one thing I know how to do: be human. I want to connect with local communities. I want to make other people's lives better. I want to fill my life with rich human experiences and emotions. And somewhere within that deep unknown, somewhere primal, I'll be writing, composing music, playing, laughing, and spending time with my wife, kids, and friends. Not because it earns money or validates my worth, but because it's subversively human.