Human or Dancer

Yesterday I stumbled on an article by Rice University's Dean of Engineering and Computing, Luay Nakhleh, responding to a recent meeting he attended on Human Flourishing. He asked, "Is AI Ruining Our Ability to Think?" His answer is the one beloved by every lover of philosophy, myself included: that this is the wrong question. I highly recommend you give it a read.

We have been asking some version of this question for decades, swapping in whatever the new tool is, and the question never changes even though the subject always does. The better question, he says, is narrower and harder: what is this particular use doing to your thinking? The struggle was never the obstacle on the way to understanding. The struggle was the thing building it.

The article was written after attending a meeting called "Human Flourishing in the Age of AI," co-organized by Rodrigo Ferreira, my computer ethics professor.

The first thing I thought after reading Luay's piece was that I am perhaps the worst person to ask what is this particular use of AI doing to my thinking? Since I was a kid I have taken every shortcut I could get by with to get the value of a thing while doing less of it. I use an AI assistant over a vault of my own thoughts every single day to keep me organized and help me think. And even I, a lover of that efficiency, feel that somewhere ahead of us is a line, and that the direction we are going crosses it. That somewhere in letting AI make the thing for us, we lose the part that made it ours to begin with. But is that fear justified? Is a work of "self-expression" still valuable if it can be done in a prompt?

Again, I have been trying to answer that for weeks. But to do it I have to start with the thing I am most afraid of losing.

I have always loved film. Iconic movies like Indiana Jones hooked me when I was younger, but back in 2023, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse changed the way I viewed film entirely, and it showed me the next level of what expression could be. Colors and painted frames that symbolize different universes, characters, emotions. Frame rates changing through a scene. A score that makes you feel the movie through your ears. Jokes, easter eggs, hundreds of references that build up the Odyssean story tying all of it together. And yes, I'm talking about an animated comic book movie.

In my eyes, to label it just as that is perhaps the biggest disrespect humanly possible. This film was the brilliant unwavering expression of thousands of people's ideas poured into one work of art. After graduating high school, I saw it five times in theaters, each time with different people so I could re-experience it through them, notice more hidden absurd details that made me appreciate it more, feel more connected to it, bring me inside the heads of the people who made it. I fell in love with this wonderful idea of expression through small details, the little things that show more and more of who someone is in a way that words by themselves could not. I think you find out who you are in the same way, one carved detail explored at a time. To make something like that of my own one day has always been a distant dream.

And that is the thing I am most afraid of losing. As the world rewards execution more and more, we lose the time to be careful with what we make, to shape it into the true vision we set out for, until we forget that expression had any value at all. And the film I always told myself I would make one day feels like it could slip away before I ever begin it.

I am a computer science major at Rice, and the more time I spent there, the more I felt like that had to be my identity. It was how I introduced myself for recruiting, to professors, to anyone new I met. But I felt the same way about my major that I felt about a simple description of the Spider-Verse movies. It was almost a disrespect to label me as just that, to recognize me as just that.

I first got into software while playing Minecraft and using command blocks to make this online world more of one that I imagined. I put together that "computer science" somehow equaled making a game that let me create these awesome buildings and connect with friends. So naturally I took AP Computer Science, and stubbornly assuming my Minecraft command blocks gave me a natural edge, I barely studied and scored a 39 percent on my first ever test. I complained endlessly that a Java test on loops could not possibly have anything to do with actually creating things. I was lucky to have a teacher, Mark Fidler, who somehow saw the desperate desire to create underneath the complaining and not only gave me another shot, but helped me see the world that we were building towards and told me about a final project where we'd get to build whatever we wanted. I did not let that shot go to waste. I ended that year doing exactly what I took the class for: building the ideas in my head. I hated the scheduling app we used at school and had a hundred ideas to make it not just better, but more lively, connected, and helpful, so I spent my final project bingeing iOS Academy videos, learning how to transform a year's worth of Computer Science classes into mobile apps. That summer I continued that bingeing and built a mobile app for my Dad. And then that fall I built Knight Life, the way I envisioned people seeing their schedules: snowflakes falling on the home screen in winter, notes shared for all classmates, lunch menus available in a click, a schedule that was customizable and persisted regardless of what device I looked at.

The part of this story that I have never told is perhaps the most crucial in understanding who I am: I built that app for me. Despite what story I had to tell to make me seem like this big entrepreneur, I didn't build it because I saw this pain point in students' lives, or because I thought I could improve it. I saw an opportunity to express myself and build the world that existed in my head into reality for the first time ever, even if I was the only one who would ever use it. Especially if I was the only one. Building it was the first time I found out something about myself I couldn't have told you beforehand, that the version of the world in my head was specific, and mine, and worth making real. I used that app every day and the only reason it's still used at my high school to this day is because my sister (much to my horror) told every one of her friends at school that I had built this awesome new scheduling app. Everyone came up to me asking to use it, so I slowly made it available to more and more people until eventually I caved and launched it on the app store.

I got incredibly lucky things worked out with that app. Just recently handing over the app to its now fourth leader since I left led me to revisit it and laugh at many of the architectural decisions I made back then. But it also left me with an enormous amount of pride, knowing where these new leaders can take it.

We now live in a world where you do not need to binge those videos or stay up every night for weeks just to make your vision real for the first time. You probably do not have to go through the ordeal of your whole school stopping you in the hallway to report the same bug, over and over. You can get the first version of it out with a few prompts. And with constant iteration, and questions, and a few people still coming up to you and telling you about bugs, that iteration carries you far past the barriers you used to get stuck on and into way more ideas than you had before.

Walking around San Francisco yesterday, my friend Michel and I shared the same realization: when we are blocked by friction in our lives, we no longer have to work around it, we can explore and build the solution ourselves. We no longer have to build a business to justify what we make, or chase millions of users. We now have the freedom to build truly for ourselves and let others use the tools if they want to. Even though businesses can be great and I loved many parts of the tedious learning journey to building apps, being able to do this amidst a busy life is the greatest gift he or I could ask for.

But this is where I feel that line somewhere ahead of us. The biggest risk is not that AI makes bad art (although it can and does). It is that the barrier to making something gets so low that we stop thinking our ideas all the way through, that we never sit with a vision long enough to find out what it actually wants to be. Across the Spider-Verse took years to make. Artists spent days on single frames, and there are hundreds of thousands of frames in that film. The depth I kept noticing on the fifth watch, the thing that made me feel I was inside their heads, was not separate from that labor. It was the labor, made visible. If you can get any idea out in an afternoon, the danger is that you never work on it long enough to perfect it. Still, the people with a real vision will never accept an AI approximation as the finished form of what they saw.

I do not think the answer is more struggle for its own sake. Too much of it and you never get the idea out at all, which is its own kind of loss. The answer is that there are two different struggles, and we keep confusing them. There is the struggle to start, the long climb of learning and getting over the wall of not knowing how, and that one is worth reducing. These tools strip away most of the friction that climb used to carry. Then there is the struggle to carve, to take a rough vision and cut it down until it is exactly what you saw, and that one is the entire point. Kevin Parker made the first version of "The Less I Know the Better" in about fifteen minutes, and then spent months carving it until he knew: that's it. The first take is easy now. The carving is still the work, and the carving is still yours, and the carving will hopefully get easier, but it should never and can never go away, because the carving is also how you find out what you actually saw.

The gift goes deeper than building, though, or rather it's the same gift seen further down. Now I get to learn at the pace I actually understand things. I get to ask the question I have right where I am, without being embarrassed that I'm further behind than others in class. I get to explore Aristotle and see how his ideas touch other people's ideas, and then ask the next question, and the next. For a shy kid who was scared to ask questions and scared to explore his own interests, out of fear of not fitting in or not being good enough, this is not just a solution. These tools help remove the friction that these fears create, and then afterward even reveal the fears to be far less important than we make them out to be. These tools have helped me uncover who I always wanted to be, despite at times thinking I was never good enough to become that person. The curious ones, the creatives, the dreamers, the people who want to make things, those held back by the technology of our time, by the questions we didn't ask, by the tedious pathways that seemed like walls: we are living through the greatest revelation of our time.

Later on that same walk, Michel asked me the question I think sits at the root of everything I worry about. So many of these new companies are built for people who want to create (like Sora), so why are so many of us still so fixated on consumption? Even the people with the best tools for making things, most of the time, just don't.

People sometimes avoid building because they can't. But even when they can, they often still don't, maybe because they don't know they want to. And they don't know that because they've never gone looking. For years I never asked why or how, because I wasn't curious, and I wasn't curious because I had never examined enough of myself to find the questions. There were other reasons too, the fears and shyness and silencers I have written about before. When you explore what is actually on your mind, all the way down, you start unlocking pieces of the puzzle of who you are. You see the parts that don't add up. You see what you are uncertain of, what you have been scared to look at. It all gets examined.

Most people do not get the luxury of the time to even examine these things, but I believe more people will. So the barrier these tools are really lowering is not the barrier to creativity. It is the barrier to knowing yourself. AI can be the most important piece in our journey as humans toward flourishing.

But the gift has a shadow. The same tools that can lower the barrier to knowing yourself can just as easily be built to do the opposite, and increasingly they are. I would even argue that part of why people stop having ideas worth chasing is exactly this: being handed something so frictionless and so tailored that you never have to think, never have to go looking, never find out what you actually wanted to make. And the choice of whether to think at all is increasingly not yours, it's being made upstream, by what companies decide to build and put in front of you. A tool aimed at making you think less is a tool aimed, whether it means to or not, at keeping you from yourself.

There is a song by The Killers I haven't stopped listening to since I was reminded of it at the Champions League final last week. Are we human, or are we dancer? A dancer moves to a rhythm someone else chose. A human dares to ask why, goes looking, and carves the one thing only they could have made. For now, it is in our hands to decide where this technology goes, whether we use it to turn people into better consumers, or into more of themselves. My fear is that one day it will not be in our hands at all. That is the day my film stays unmade, and the dreamers quietly disappear.