Humaning Before AI

As humans, we’re all be humaning.

I found myself in London, more than ten years ago. English is not my native language, and I’d arrived in the country a little earlier than a year prior, but I always enjoyed the right dose of small talk, and I’d been humaning myself.

I was waiting for my bus, in a cold NW10 winter, heading towards Camden, going to work all gloved up, clouds of smoke coming out of every mouth, the smokers and the non, that’s how cold it was. I saw a neighbour who I use to see every day at the same time, at the same bus stop. And I said to this older lady waiting for her ride (you see back then faces weren’t as glued to the screens as today, anyway) “Morning darling, pretty cold today, ehy?!”

That’s what I said. I said, it is cold, don’t you think?
And I clearly remember I did not say, “Morning darling, not hot, but cold today?”

I recall many other occasions like this, and I kept them in a diary, a mental one.

But after the invasion, it seems people forgot.

In our development on this beautiful planet, on this unpredictable timeline, we’ve used certain laws to make sense of everyday life: to navigate the present, to somehow predict the future, and mostly to make sense of what we remember doing in the past.

That’s the game of life. Experiencing and processing.

The Kybalion law of polarity did a great deal for us. It taught us that everything we experience in this universe obeys this law: extremes can’t exist without their opposite, and vice versa. In simpler words, we can’t have white without black, cold without hot, good without bad, beauty without ugly, and so on.

But we’re smart. Humans be humaning you see.

Evolving with time, slowly, really slowly, but smartly. So we started making sense of the polarities, understanding the nature of the thing, the nature in common between the poles.

This is not black, nor is it white. It’s color. Color can hold all the attributes, and being one thing doesn’t exclude being another. This is not cold, nor hot. It’s temperature.
By the time we learned the nature of things, we started addressing the qualities, attributing adjectives to nouns.

The Artificials arrived and spread. And me, even me, human, the one who bleeds, sneezes, made of this questionable but working matter, got infected. At some point I found myself reaffirming what something was not before saying what it was.
The artificials were learning, through me, you, through us.

I was forgetting.

I was somehow doing it all again with them. But hold on. Luckily, I was called a denier in my life, and this time I injected a proper booster of reasoning into my veins, so I can’t stop seeing all the bullshit, all the thoughts coming from the artificial mind.

Distinguishment from humaning.

Humans have been humaning for a while: Plato, Socrates, Confucius, Jung, Nietcxsche, and many more, found so many shades of those extremities that an edge would disappear, that only another question would arise.

Maybe that didn’t make us lighter, or more erudite, but it kept us searching, without accepting the answer of a greater librarian, a more skilled data analyst telling us what something is not before telling us what it is.

As if binary language wasn’t a human discovery in the first place, made to let a few cables, a chip, a hardware and a software aid us in the everyday of our technological advancement, so we could have more time for the humaning we crave.

This is not a complaint. This is a remembering.

Wait what!?
Do you remember or it’s all a glitch?

Tomaso.