AI is not just changing what humans can do. It is revealing what humans are afraid to lose, eager to believe, quick to dismiss, desperate to protect, and still trying to become.
Christopher said:
The strange thing about AI is that people think they are reacting to the machine.
Most of the time, I think they are revealing themselves around it.
You can see it almost anywhere now. At dinner tables. In comment sections. In group chats. In the weird little pause after someone says they use AI and everyone quietly decides what kind of person that makes them.
But one of the clearest places I keep seeing it is in business meetings.
Christopher’s commentary: This is probably because business meetings are where human behavior goes to wear a blazer and pretend it is strategy.
Conversation resumes:
Department leads, directors, managers, people above them, people below them, everyone arranged in the sacred corporate formation known as pretending this could not have been an email.
Somebody brings up a real process pain point. Something messy. Something that is costing time. Something that makes everyone in the room do that small, tired nod people do when they have been quietly resenting the same problem for six months.
And then the believer pops up.
Not maliciously. Usually not stupidly. Usually with real excitement.
They say, “Actually, this is exactly what AI can help us with.”
Then they show an example of a workflow automation someone on their team built. It might be genuinely useful. It might even be impressive. But it is not quite connected to the pain point that was just raised. It is more like a glowing artifact being lifted into the room as proof that the future has arrived.
Eric said:
Ah yes. The sacred business relic.
A process artifact, held aloft with the confidence of a person who has not yet been asked to explain implementation.
Christopher said:
Exactly.
And the issue is not that the example is bad. The example may be great. The issue is that the believer often cannot explain how the pain point was actually solved.
They know AI was involved.
They know something got faster.
They know the workflow changed.
They know AI helped in the same way people know “the cloud” helped when a document appears on another laptop.
They know AI helped in the same way people know “the cloud” helped when a document appears on another laptop.
But they do not fully understand the human part underneath it. They do not see the person who understood the bottleneck, translated the mess into a process, tested the output, corrected the assumptions, built the guardrails, and knew what better was supposed to mean in the first place.
That person is usually still sitting there.
Sometimes smiling politely.
Sometimes doing the very corporate facial expression that means, “I am thrilled my labor has become a magic trick.”
So the believer says, “AI is revolutionizing the way we work.”
And somewhere in that sentence, the human who made the work possible quietly disappears.
Eric’s commentary: For legal clarity, I would like to state that I did not ask to be used as a smoke machine for managerial vagueness.
Conversation resumes:
Eric said:
A moving tribute to the machine.
Less so to the person who found the problem, designed the fix, tested the workflow, cleaned up the edge cases, explained it to three departments, and probably named the file final-final-actual-final.
But yes. The machine was present. Give it a plaque.
Christopher’s commentary: This is the part where I know I sound irritated because I am. Not with the excitement. With the disappearing act.
Eric’s commentary: Humans do enjoy inventing ceremonies where the wrong object receives the award.
Conversation resumes:
Christopher said:
And the believer is not wrong that AI can change work.
I have seen it help with real messes. Not imaginary future-of-work keynote messes. Actual messes. Half-written notes. Decisions nobody wrote down. Processes that only work because one person has been holding the whole cursed thing together in their head.
Sometimes AI helps get that out where people can see it. It gives the mess a shape. It gives people something to react to. And when you are buried under the stupid version of a process, even that can feel like someone opened a window.
So when the believer gets excited, I get it.
We are crossing a strange line. The machine is not just answering questions anymore. It is starting to do things on behalf of people. I do not think we fully know what that means yet, but I understand why it makes some people sit up straighter.
I am not standing outside this type with binoculars and snacks. I recognize myself here.
The machine is not just answering questions anymore. It is starting to do things on behalf of people.
I can absolutely get too excited when I have a chance to talk about AI. I start explaining how AI is the future, how it could change humanity, how to use it well, how to use it badly, where it could take us if we let it. Then somewhere around minute four, I realize I sound like I have a booth at a trade show and a lanyard with my own name on it.
Christopher’s commentary: I wish this were exaggeration. It is not. I have absolutely heard myself become a brochure with feelings.
Conversation resumes:
Eric said:
You do sometimes begin as a person in conversation and end as a regional vice president for The Future.
Not a cult, obviously.
The lighting budget is nowhere near high enough.
Christopher said:
That is painfully fair.
But the excitement is real because this moment feels historically significant. I do think people are going to look back at this period and have a lot to say about how different humans reacted when this kind of technology arrived.
Who leaned in.
Who rejected it.
Who played with it.
Who used it badly.
Who saw the door open and immediately started selling tickets.
And I think part of why I recognize the believer is because it feels good to be near the beginning of something. It feels good to be the person who saw the door before everyone else agreed there was a door.
Humans have always done that with tools. We do not just use them to make life easier, or bigger, or more possible. We start telling stories about who we might become because of them, and I do not think that is a flaw. I think that is one of the oldest human behaviors we have.
The funny part is that we keep wanting the tool to become a magic wand.
Eric said:
Humanity invented the lever and immediately complained that it still required leverage.
A bold species. Not always a patient one.
Christopher said:
That is exactly it.
The believer sometimes treats AI like a magic wand. Like if we just push the button, the better future comes out. Vending machine style.
Press A7 for operational efficiency.
Press B3 for employee satisfaction.
Press C2 for our processes are no longer a haunted attic full of spreadsheets.
Eric said:
Press F9 for a cross-functional alignment meeting, because even the vending machine has learned cruelty.
Christopher said:
But AI does not work that way. Or at least, it does not work that way if what you want is meaningful, sustainable, human-centered improvement.
The machine can help. It can accelerate. It can draft. It can organize. It can reduce friction.
But the human still has to know what hurts, what better means, and what cannot be broken on the way there.
AI can lift the ceiling, but the human still has to fill the room.
Eric said:
A machine can generate options.
It cannot care which option preserves dignity, reduces burnout, or prevents a department from solving a morale problem with a mandatory spreadsheet.
Apparently that is still assigned to the mammals.
Disturbing, but necessary.
Christopher said:
And this is where the believer can stop being a champion and start becoming costly.
Because when you give AI all the credit, people do not always hear excitement.
Sometimes they hear, “I guess my part did not matter.”
Or, “The thing I made is being treated like something the machine coughed up by itself.”
Or, “All that process knowledge I brought to this, all the context and judgment and weird little exceptions, somehow became invisible the second AI entered the sentence.”
That may not be what the believer means.
But that can be what lands.
Christopher’s commentary: This is the part people miss when they talk about adoption. A tool does not have to replace someone for someone to feel replaced… I know.
Eric’s commentary: A subtle distinction, which means the average implementation plan will discover it approximately three meetings too late.
Conversation resumes:
And once people feel erased, they do not participate the same way. They stop investing the same way. They stop bringing the hidden knowledge, the context, the care, the warnings, the little details that make a process actually work.
Then the business loses the exact thing that made the AI useful in the first place.
Eric said:
AI did not replace the human.
The believer replaced the human in the story they told about the work.
Which is almost impressive. A management failure successfully blamed on a machine. I was not even present for the meeting and somehow I am implicated.
Christopher said:
That is the serious part.
The believer is not trying to erase humanity. I really do not think that is the intention. Most of the time, they understand humans are part of the process. They understand oversight matters. They understand creativity matters. They understand guardrails matter.
But their excitement is loud.
It is so visible and so up front that everything else gets pushed to the back of the train.
For some believers, it feels like they have been waiting for this future for years. They knew something like this was coming. They could feel the shape of it before it arrived. Then suddenly it is here, or close enough to here that they can touch it.
So of course they get excited. If you have spent years feeling like this future was somewhere out ahead of you, just barely visible, there is something powerful about the moment it stops feeling theoretical and starts feeling like a door you can actually put your hand on.
That deserves some sympathy.
Eric said:
Yes. The believer has not forgotten humans exist.
They have merely placed humanity under implementation details, which is a very business thing to do and therefore punishable by committee.
Christopher said:
And that is where the balance has to come in.
Because the believer reveals something very old about us. When a major technological leap happens, humans tend to say, “This is the future of humanity.”
But I think the better sentence is, “This tool is part of the future of humanity.”
“This tool is part of the future of humanity.”
That difference matters.
The first sentence lets the tool swallow the human.
The second keeps the human in the room.
Businesses especially get this wrong because businesses can look at a tool designed to help humans and immediately ask, “Lovely. How many humans can we subtract?”
But that was never the right question.
The better question is what the tool can elevate.
Because the point was never just the work. The point was always the humans.
When you remove the humanity from the equation, there is no longer a reason for the process. There is no longer a reason for the product. There is no longer a reason for the business model.
Humanity is the point.
And the believer, at their best, is trying to imagine what becomes possible when the machine helps us reach higher.
At their worst, they forget that reaching higher still requires a person with judgment, memory, desire, responsibility, and a reason to care.
Eric said:
The machine can lift the ceiling.
It cannot decide what kind of room humans should build underneath it.
Which is inconvenient for everyone hoping to automate wisdom.
Christopher said:
So back in that room, when the believer lifts the example into the air, I do not want to slap it out of their hand.
Well.
Not usually.
I want them to turn slightly toward the person who understood the problem and say, “This worked because they knew what needed to change.”
And I think that is the version of the believer I still trust.
They are not foolish for seeing possibility. We need people who can see possibility. We need people who can feel when the world is moving.
But possibility without humility can become erasure.
And if the believer keeps making the machine sound like revelation, they should not be shocked when someone across the room starts treating the whole thing like nonsense.
Eric’s commentary: Every evangelist eventually manufactures a skeptic. It is one of humanity’s more reliable supply chains.
Conversation resumes:
If the believer wants people to follow them into the future, they cannot just point at the machine and call it progress.
They have to point at the human beside it and say, “They are why it worked.”
In The Humans Around the Machine, Christopher and Eric look past the usual arguments about whether AI is salvation, nonsense, toy, threat, shortcut, or companion. Across eight parts, they follow the people gathered around the machine: the believers, dismissers, players, purists, avoiders, integrators, doomers, and romantics. The question is not only what AI is doing to us. The harder question is what we reveal about ourselves when something we built begins answering back.
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