The Value of Being Human
When intelligence becomes abundant, what remains beyond intelligence? A reflection on presence, craftsmanship, and what machines cannot replicate.
A child looks up from the dinner table.
"Why is the sky orange tonight?"
Before anyone answers, a hand reaches instinctively for a phone. Within seconds, the explanation appears: the angle of the sun, particles in the atmosphere, the scattering of light. It is accurate. Complete. Instantly available.
The child listens. Then asks another question.
"Have you ever seen a sky like this before?"
The phone has no memory of that evening. The parent does.
The Quiet Arrival of Intelligence
Not long ago, intelligence carried visible weight.
It lived in libraries, laboratories and universities. It took years to acquire, longer to master, and often a lifetime to share. Expertise was recognised because it was rare.
Today, intelligence has become increasingly accessible. A report can be drafted before a meeting begins. Software can write software. Images appear from a sentence. Languages dissolve into one another with a click.
Artificial intelligence has not merely accelerated knowledge. It has altered our relationship with it. For the first time, extraordinary cognitive ability is beginning to feel ordinary — like electricity, like search engines. The remarkable is quietly becoming infrastructure.
The question is no longer whether machines can think. It is what remains valuable when thinking itself is no longer scarce.
When Every Tool Becomes Common
History rarely removes human value. It relocates it.
When the Jacquard loom was introduced in France in 1804, it transformed textile production by automating intricate weaving patterns through punched cards. Many feared that skilled weaving would become obsolete. Yet the loom did not end craftsmanship. It changed where craftsmanship lived.
As mechanised weaving spread across Europe, the luxury textile houses of Lyon continued to distinguish themselves not through speed, but through the quality of their silk, the refinement of their designs and the judgment of generations of artisans. Automation made beautiful cloth more common. It made exceptional craftsmanship easier to recognise.
The hand that shapes clay carries something no algorithm can replicate — the accumulated judgment of a life spent in practice. Unsplash
Technology often changes what society rewards. It rarely changes what people ultimately admire.
Knowing, Understanding, and Caring
Oncologists are often taught a small ritual that has nothing to do with medicine.
Before delivering difficult news, many will sit down. The diagnosis itself requires medical knowledge. Sitting down does not. It communicates something medicine alone cannot: that another human being is fully present in the room.
Knowledge explains. Judgment decides. Presence comforts.
Artificial intelligence may eventually deliver medical information with astonishing accuracy. Whether someone feels seen is another question entirely.
Hannah Arendt distinguished between knowing and thinking. Facts can be accumulated; thinking is the ongoing work of making sense of them. Wisdom begins where information alone is no longer enough.
Presence is not a feature. It is the irreducible fact of one consciousness choosing to remain with another. Unsplash
The distinction is easy to overlook because it cannot be measured as easily as intelligence. Yet much of life depends upon it.
Intelligence Is Not the Same as Wisdom
The philosopher Martin Buber believed that human life finds its meaning in encounter.
His distinction between I–It and I–Thou was not about information. It was about relationship. An object can be understood. A person must be encountered.
This difference becomes increasingly significant as conversations with machines grow more convincing. Artificial intelligence can generate language that feels compassionate. It can recognise patterns in grief, loneliness and joy. It can respond with remarkable fluency.
What it cannot do is stand inside the relationship itself. Conversation has never mattered simply because answers were exchanged. Sometimes we speak because another consciousness shares the silence between sentences.
Why We Still Make Things by Hand
Walk through the workshops of Hermès in Pantin, just outside Paris, and the pace feels almost indifferent to the speed of the modern world. A single artisan may spend many hours constructing one leather bag, following it from the first cut of leather to the final stitch.
The efficiency of industrial production has never been a mystery there. Neither has its limitation.
The value of craftsmanship is not that machines cannot produce objects. It is that care leaves traces.
Care is not merely a method of production. It is a way of relating to the world. Unsplash
In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett argues that craftsmanship is an enduring human impulse — the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Perhaps this explains why handmade ceramics, mechanical watches and analogue photography continue to attract people despite the availability of faster, cheaper alternatives. The object carries evidence of attention. It reminds us that someone remained present long enough for care to become visible.
The New Scarcity
Economists have long observed that value follows scarcity.
When something becomes abundant, our attention shifts toward what remains difficult to obtain. The economist Fred Hirsch described this through what he called positional goods — things whose value arises precisely because they cannot be universally possessed.
Perhaps humanity is entering a similar moment. Information becomes abundant. Judgment becomes scarce. Images become limitless, making discernment more valuable than production itself. Conversations become effortless. Trust becomes difficult to earn.
In a world where almost anyone can produce competent work with extraordinary tools, character may distinguish people more than capability. When intelligence becomes abundant, judgment becomes the rarer form of wealth.
Closing Reflection
The child at the dinner table asks one more question.
The parent looks at the phone. Then places it back on the table.
"I don't actually know," they say. "But I remember another evening like this when I was about your age."
The conversation continues before the search begins. Eventually, they look up the answer together.
The sky that prompted the question. The memory that outlasted the answer. Unsplash
Perhaps that is where the value of being human has always lived.
Not in knowing everything, but in sharing a life with one another.