The ultimate expression of humanity in an increasingly machine world is discernment. You’ll be shocked to know that like most things about being human, it takes time to emerge and mature. Discernment requires cultivation through time, attention, choice, and trust.
The fact that it is not automatic, immediate, or inevitable makes it deeply human.
I believe that right now, what makes us human will, not only, help us survive, but will ultimately allow us to thrive. In this Age of Ai we must cultivate what makes us uniquely human, that which a machine could never replicate. Discernment being foremost among them because of its wide applicability; spot a fake, see the lie, feel what’s real, curate with style, and move in alignment with your uniqueness. I believe this is a survivors kit for the coming robot apocalypse. Here’s why discernment makes us human and might save our humanity.
Discernment is not easy or automatic, it requires careful attention. To an expert it might even feel like a sense of intuition. But that intuition grows from the time and attention that leads to a sense of confidence through familiarity.
According to their Latin root, “cernere” (meaning to sift, sort, decide, or determine), the words discernment and certainty are cousins. To be certain is to be assured or confident (in your determination). But the addition of “dis” to “cernere” adds a layer of critical thinking. Discernment is to sort by finding fault with something. You know what belongs by discerning what does not belong. It’s subtractive in nature.
Authenticators who are trained to detect counterfeit items, articles of clothing, art works, or money, spend more time studying the genuine article than they do fakes.The ways in which you can counterfeit something are myriad there’s no way to identify them all. They identify common “tells”, ways that a forger would have trouble replicating something real. Hands in a photo, for instance. We know what real hands look like, how they work, and what they look like in photographs because we’ve seen them all our lives. We have the experience of them over time that leads to true familiarity. Right now, looking for a hand with six fingers is one of the ways we can quickly and confidently discern if an image is real people or an Ai creation. Over time it will take even more discernment in other ways to detect inauthenticity.
As the technology improves it will require the choice to devote that time and attention to discerning in the first place. Cultivating discernment is a personal and ongoing choice that determines the quality of our lives. What do we allow in? What do we keep out? Into our mind and heart, out of our space, our community, our world? If we accept everything at face value when we know a) humans are deceivable and b) there are many who would deceive for their own gain, then we are, in essence, setting out to be deceived. Is it complicity with those who would deceive to know it exists and do nothing to deter it?
For those who value authenticity, it is an undertaking to seek it out and remain connected to it, (both within ourselves and in our interactions with the world around us). Discernment fundamentally involves choice. To choose what something is; friend or foe, real or counterfeit, machine or human. Then we decide if that’s something we trust or suspect.
We’re swimming in other-people’s-incentives, biased narratives, and emotional manipulation being used to sell us everything under the sun. In this environment learning to trust one’s self is challenging, yet vital. In a time when we cannot be sure of what’s real, the antidote to suspicion is self-trust. Trust in self is a key aspect of discernment because it requires that you believe yourself unequivocally even when you may not be able to explain why. This is the type of certainty the future will require.
I have to admit, self-trust is not a perfect system. Humans are biased, we have blindspots, we are able to be deceived, and the most common perpetrator of this deception is one’s self. And yet, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather an honest mistake I brought on myself than being hoodwinked by a machine sent to harvest and shape my perception without my knowledge or consent.
Trust exists in the same space as care and sincerity. *I sincerely care about my wellbeing and health, already I trust myself more than a machine (or its makers).* Trust also requires two other elements: reliability and competence. And this is where we meet in the back alley with choice. Because on the surface, we may say, hey, the machines have humans beat on those two measures. Machines are reliable and competent at much more than me, fallible human that I am. And yet, to amateurs, Ai Chatbots (Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT) seem like magic. But ask anyone with experience and they generally report how nerve-wracking it is to observe the errors and misconceptions being confidently put forward by Ai. Self trust is a choice we get to (and I would urge, must) make.
The four elements of trust are care, sincerity, reliability, and competence. When these elements are present, trust flourishes. When they are absent, trust diminishes or is damaged. You know how you and Ai compare across these measures.
Trust in self emerges and grows as you use it. It’s strengthened over time. You have a sense to not change lanes and you soon see an accident where you would have been. Trust in yourself increases. This is how trust in yourself grows. But it’s slow going. There’s not always an obvious or immediate “miss” or benefit to trusting yourself. Seemingly neither good nor bad happens. Give it time.
This new age will require new set of skills, discernment being the first. It requires cultivation through time, attention, and choice. In time, I believe that we will begin to see a dividing line emerge. Those who are cultivating discernment, trusting themselves, being fully human, and then there will be those who are easily fooled, often confused, and exhausted from all the extraction.
The reason I call it THE skill of the 21st century is because there are so many forces converging upon each other with incentives that diverge from our own. While we are over here trying to dutifully recycle, plant trees, and reduce plastic use, there are forces in our world that would extract anything from us they can for power, control, and/ or greed in ever new ways.
Discernment helps us to see that the valuable resource to extract isn’t our money... it’s our humanity. The more we cultivate our ability to discern, the more we preserve what was always ours to begin with, the thing the robots want but cannot take without our permission.
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