The AI Question Nobody Wants to Ask

What are we becoming?

by Fred Moss, MD

I want to ask you something that I have not seen asked directly, at least not in the places where people are celebrating artificial intelligence as the next great leap forward.

Here it is:

What are we becoming?

Not what are we building. Not what are we optimizing. Not what new efficiencies are we unlocking or what old jobs are we replacing or how many tokens per second can we now process.

What are we becoming. As humans. In relationship to this.

I ask because I think the question is being deliberately avoided. Not out of malice. Out of momentum. The conversation is moving so fast that stopping to ask what it is doing to us feels almost quaint. Almost like standing in front of a train to ask where it is going.

But I am a psychiatrist. I spent 37 years watching what happens to human beings when they outsource the hard parts of being alive. When they use substances to avoid feeling. When they use diagnosis to avoid accountability. When they use any sufficiently powerful external system to replace the internal work that only they can do.

I know what that looks like on the other end.

And some of what I am seeing in our collective relationship with AI looks familiar.

The jolts of satisfaction that exceed what ordinary human interaction provides. The pull toward the tool when the human alternative feels slower or less certain. The gradual narrowing of tolerance for ambiguity, for delay, for the particular frustration of trying to be understood by someone who does not yet understand you.

I am not saying AI is bad. I use it every day. I am saying that the question of what it is doing to us is not a question we can afford to skip.

Because the thing that makes us human – the capacity for genuine connection, for sitting with uncertainty, for being changed by an encounter with another person – is not something that can be preserved by accident. It requires intention. It requires the willingness to choose the slower, harder, less optimized path when that path is the one that keeps us human.

AI will not ask you to do that. It cannot. It has no stake in your humanity.

Only you do.

And only you can answer the question nobody wants to ask.

Fred Moss, MD, is a recovering psychiatrist and the author of Welcome to Humanity. He writes about mental health, human connection, and the cost of the systems we build to replace both.