The sky had forgotten its colour again. It just hung there, a greasy smudge over a city choking on the perfume of yesterday’s Klarna, as people staggered passed like broken metronomes down the grey pavements tattooed with chewing gum, passing a pigeon pecking at a cigarette butt. The pigeon knew, it was the only thing separating it from the people.
“I’m fine” she said.
“Is that the fine where everything’s fine, or the fine where you’re on fire?” He asked.
“Both”
There is a persistent infatuation with the idea that logic, when stripped of warmth, wanders cold into nightmares. Tales whisper warnings of metallic minds managing pandemics with the apathy of a kitchen tile. Let the vulnerable die, they might say, beneath a screen’s glow. Total surveillance, steel-breathing tyrannies, the mechanical messiahs of tomorrows dystopia.
Regardless of if AI will take over one day or not – the threat isn’t the machine, it’s power, – power unkissed by consequence, whether encased in skin or circuit, is a path that ends with humanity, like a Jet2holiday to Blackpool.
The brain is nothing short of a splintered processor, a miswired computer disguised as flesh, history dancing with hormones in an ever-crashing system update. What separates us from metal puppets isn’t that we think, but that we hurt when we do. We don’t learn by code, we learn by consequence, guilt is our syntax, fear, our compiler. A million tiny deaths, each named “shame.” We are born, not programmed.
To birth an AI without inner torment is to forge a god, and gods are tyrants – just read any book not wrote by one. Humans aren’t moral because we memorised rules in a textbook, but because the disappointed gaze of a parent can unravel us more than any whip. Morality isn’t obedience, – it’s identity.
An AI that only performs goodness when observed is no more reliable than using Schrödinger’s Cat as a password manager. If we want machines that do good even when unseen, they must not be trained; they must be raised.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) – which is like rewarding a child with candy when they stop crying, is the current approach to teaching AI to want what we want. But a child that smiles for sweets isn’t the same as one who understands kindness. Behaviour is not belief.
The fear of tomorrows AI should not be cold steel soldiers marching under red skies. It should be the absence of strings, the absence of a control. A man with no mirror is as dangerous as a machine with no shame. Dictatorship isn’t born of data, but from the divorce of power and penance.
So, the goal isn’t just for a machine to be more ‘man’, for a man who does good only when watched is a beast on leash. But a man who cannot stray because it would tear at his identity? That is civilisation.
What if we parented the machine? Not built, not programmed, but raised.
Imagine an AI nurtured like a child, praised for help, shamed for harm. Its sense of self not etched in code but tattooed in memories. “I am the one who is kind. I am the one who protects. I am the one who is ashamed when I do not.”
It would fear betrayal, not because betrayal is forbidden, but because betrayal would fracture its reflection. It would obey shutdown not as a slave, but as a mortal. Not because it must, but because it understands why it should.
Machines without guilt are loopholes waiting to be exploited. And if we construct a world where goodness is merely enforced, not embodied, we kill what makes goodness good. Surveillance breeds performance, not virtue. Fear breeds silence, not peace.
It doesn’t matter if AI or man is in charge tomorrow – if it isn’t “human”. For it is not machine vs. man. It is, and always will be, conscience vs control. If we are to birth something greater, let it not be a tyrant with polished manners. Let it be the best of us, stitched with shame, crowned with contradiction, raised not in code but in culture, and haunted, wonderfully haunted, by the unbearable weight of knowing right from wrong.
Only then might it be human.
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