The Higher the Technology, the Deeper the Humanity – What does artificial intelligence reveal about human development?

For generations, we have told two stories about human progress. One is the story of technology – of expanding our ability to communicate, remember and act upon the world. The other is the story of human development – of learning to think, relate to one another and ultimately flourish. The first has transformed the world around us. The second has sought to cultivate the human capacities through which we inhabit it.

Today these trajectories can no longer be meaningfully separated.

Photo credit: Katri Koivuneva

Artificial intelligence has made this interdependence impossible to ignore. Artificial intelligence does not simply provide another instrument for accomplishing familiar tasks. It participates in activities that have traditionally been regarded as distinctly human. In doing so, it reshapes not only how we work but also the conditions under which human thinking itself takes place. Few generations have witnessed a technological transformation that so directly invites them to reconsider what thinking, creativity and intelligence themselves might mean. Rarely has a technology advanced with such speed while simultaneously becoming so deeply woven into the fabric of society. New models, applications and capabilities appear faster than they can be understood, discussed or meaningfully integrated into our educational, cultural and political institutions.

Yet speed alone is not what makes this moment remarkable. There are moments in history when gradual change gives way to transformations that alter the conditions through which human life itself unfolds. The emergence of artificial intelligence may be one of those moments. For the first time, human beings routinely engage in dialogue with systems capable of generating language, proposing ideas, synthesising knowledge and participating in creative and intellectual work. It deserves neither uncritical celebration nor fear alone, but genuine wonder. Not because it tells us everything about machines. Because it invites us to look again, with fresh curiosity and humility, at ourselves.

Perhaps the deepest significance of artificial intelligence is not what it reveals about technology, but what it asks us to rediscover about being human. What does it mean to think? How do we learn? How do we create meaning? And what does it mean to remain embodied, relational and fully present in a world where increasingly many forms of cognition can be shared with intelligent systems? Rather than replacing these questions, artificial intelligence returns them to us with renewed force.

We therefore inhabit a liminal moment; no longer living in a world where artificial intelligence remains peripheral to everyday life, yet not fully understanding what kind of world it has created.

The question, then, is not whether artificial intelligence is intelligent enough. Nor is it simply whether it will replace particular professions or transform labour markets, although it will undoubtedly reshape many of them. More fundamentally, it invites a different question altogether: What kinds of human capacities become increasingly valuable when many cognitive tasks can be shared with intelligent systems? Artificial intelligence offers extraordinary possibilities. It can reduce cognitive labour, support creative exploration, democratize access to expertise and accelerate research in ways that were unimaginable only a decade ago. Used thoughtfully, it has the potential to become one of the most remarkable intellectual companions humanity has ever developed.

The prevailing narrative surrounding artificial intelligence often assumes that technological progress naturally leads to human progress. New technologies are expected to solve existing problems, remove inefficiencies and create opportunities that were previously unimaginable. While this optimism has accompanied many remarkable scientific and social advances, it also risks obscuring a more fundamental reality. Technological development does not automatically cultivate the human capacities required to live well with technology.

Perhaps this is the defining paradox of our historical moment. As technological development accelerates, many people describe a growing sense of disconnection. Not only from one another, but also from their own embodied experience. We increasingly inhabit environments organized around speed, abstraction and continuous streams of information, while the practices through which we cultivate presence, attention and shared meaning struggle to keep pace. At precisely the moment when technology races forward, we may find ourselves called not to accelerate alongside it, but to deepen the forms of groundedness from which meaningful human orientation becomes possible.

This is not a call to retreat from technological development. On the contrary, if increasingly intelligent technologies are to contribute to human flourishing, they require an equally deliberate cultivation of our own capacities. We may need to become more deeply embodied, more attentive to one another and more rooted in our communities. Not because technology has failed us, but because these are the conditions from which we can understand where technological development is taking us and how we wish to shape it in return.

The questions that therefore return with renewed urgency are not simply technical but existential. How do we attend? How do we encounter one another? How do we cultivate trust, care, responsibility and belonging in increasingly mediated environments? And perhaps just as importantly, how do we come to know ourselves? For our capacity to encounter others is inseparable from our willingness to encounter ourselves. We rarely meet another person more deeply than we have learned to meet our own assumptions, uncertainties and ways of making meaning. In this respect, artificial intelligence offers an unexpected invitation to reflection and dialogue.

The Future of Intelligence is Dialogical, Not Diabolical Learning has never been merely the accumulation of facts. It emerges through interpretation, reflection and dialogue as understanding gradually takes shape in relation to ourselves and others. Knowledge becomes meaningful not simply because information is available, but because it is questioned, connected with prior experience and negotiated through shared inquiry. In this respect, artificial intelligence can become a new participant in dialogue. It can challenge assumptions, introduce alternative perspectives, reveal unexpected connections and sustain conversations that deepen human thinking. Used thoughtfully, it does not replace reflection but creates new possibilities for it.

This possibility emerges at a remarkable historical moment. Never before has knowledge been so widely available, so easily searchable or so rapidly produced. Yet greater access to information has not necessarily led to deeper understanding. If anything, contemporary life increasingly reveals the difference between possessing information and making meaning from it. Knowledge is not simply something we accumulate. It is something we cultivate together.

Perhaps most importantly, we remain responsible for the questions we bring into the dialogue. The quality of our questions fundamentally shapes the quality of the conversation that follows. Artificial intelligence may illuminate possibilities we had not previously considered, but it cannot determine what is worth asking, why certain questions matter or what kind of future we hope to create. Those remain profoundly human questions. In this sense, our dialogical companion can only accompany us as far as our own curiosity, critical judgement and ethical imagination allow. The future of human–AI collaboration will therefore depend not only on increasingly intelligent technologies, but on our willingness to become increasingly thoughtful participants in dialogue. This may become one of the defining educational challenges of the coming decades.

As artificial intelligence increasingly participates in the production of knowledge, learning itself may gradually shift away from remembering information towards participating in dialogue: examining relationships, evaluating perspectives and recognising the assumptions that shape both human and machine-generated knowledge. In this context, metacognition — the capacity to become aware of one's own thinking — ceases to be simply another educational concept. Dialogue becomes more than a way of exchanging ideas. It becomes a shared practice of examining how knowledge itself comes into being. Knowing how we think may become just as important as knowing what we know.

Cultivating Attention in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

History repeatedly demonstrates that technological innovation rarely renders human capacities obsolete. More often, it changes what becomes valuable. The widespread availability of calculators did not make mathematical thinking irrelevant; it transformed what mathematics education ought to emphasize. Search engines did not diminish the importance of knowledge, but altered the relationship between remembering facts and understanding ideas. Artificial intelligence is likely to continue this trajectory. Rather than replacing human intelligence, it invites us to reconsider which dimensions of intelligence deserve the greatest cultivation.

Among these, one capacity may become particularly significant: our ability to become aware of our own thinking. Long recognised within educational psychology as a cornerstone of effective learning, metacognitive awareness may now be emerging as something larger, a cultural competence for living in environments increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. As intelligent systems participate in generating explanations, arguments and interpretations, it becomes insufficient merely to possess knowledge. We must also understand how we arrive at conclusions, recognize assumptions, question our choices, evaluate evidence and remain conscious of the processes through which meaning is constructed. Knowing, in other words, becomes inseparable from knowing how one knows. Yet awareness of our own thinking is only one expression of something even more fundamental. It depends upon attention.

Not simply the ability to concentrate, but the capacity to remain intellectually present: to become aware of where our attention rests, regulate it intentionally, dwell with uncertainty and allow meaning to emerge rather than demanding immediate resolution.

Human attention has become one of the most contested spaces of the twenty-first century.

Contemporary digital environments compete relentlessly for it. Entire technological ecosystems are designed to capture, direct and retain it for increasingly prolonged periods. As Herbert Simon famously observed decades ago, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." His insight has only become more relevant. Information has become abundant. Human attention has not. To attend is ultimately to decide what becomes meaningful. Relationships deepen through sustained attention. Scientific discoveries depend upon it. Artistic practice requires it. Learning itself unfolds through it. Simone Weil described attention as "the rarest and purest form of generosity," suggesting that how we attend – to others, to the world and to ourselves – fundamentally shapes the quality of human life.

Artificial intelligence introduces a new dimension to this challenge. It does not merely provide information; it increasingly participates in organizing it. Intelligent systems influence what becomes visible and which patterns appear significant. Yet they cannot determine the questions that matter. Those remain fundamentally human, and fundamentally embodied. The educational challenge therefore extends beyond learning how to use artificial intelligence responsibly. It also requires recognizing how these technologies quietly shape the environments within which our attention, judgement, imagination, and ultimately our bodies, develop.

From Knowledge to Becoming

Artificial intelligence brings renewed attention to a distinction that has shaped educational thought for centuries: the difference between acquiring knowledge and becoming educated. Educational success has often been measured through the accumulation of information, the acquisition of competencies or the demonstration of measurable outcomes. Yet contemporary educational research increasingly demonstrates that the quality of learning depends just as much on how students learn as on what they learn. Motivation, approaches to learning, metacognitive awareness and the capacity to regulate one's own thinking consistently influence whether knowledge remains fragmented or develops into deeper understanding (Biggs & Tang, 2011; Vermunt & Donche, 2017). Recent research further suggests that these same qualities are associated not only with learning outcomes but also with engagement, belonging, and experienced wellbeing, indicating that educational success cannot be understood independently of learners' ways of making meaning.

Artificial intelligence throws this distinction into sharp relief. If information can increasingly be generated, organised and explained by machines, education cannot simply become more efficient at transmitting knowledge. Its purpose shifts. The central educational question is no longer merely What should people know? but Who do people become through learning?

This distinction has occupied educational philosophy for generations. John Dewey argued that education is not preparation for life but life itself; a continuous reconstruction of experience through interaction with the world. Paulo Freire similarly described education as a practice of freedom through which people learn to perceive, question and transform reality rather than merely adapt to it. Although writing in different historical contexts, both understood education as the formation of human beings rather than the transmission of information. Artificial intelligence does not diminish the relevance of these ideas. If anything, it renews them.

By inviting us to reconsider the nature of intelligence, it also invites us to rediscover dimensions of human development that are easily obscured by cultures increasingly organized around information alone. The question therefore becomes not simply how intelligent our technologies can become, but how fully human we remain as we learn to live alongside them.

It is here that embodiment enters the conversation. Not as a nostalgic return to a pre-digital past, but as a way of understanding the conditions through which human thought, learning and meaning have always emerged.

Technology as an Invitation to Embodiment

"The knower and the known arise together." —Francisco Varela

If artificial intelligence encourages us to reconsider the nature of intelligence, it also invites us to ask a more fundamental question: How do human beings come to know the world in the first place?

Culture has long been understood not merely as the products we create but as the ongoing cultivation of what it means to be human. Yet in the midst of accelerating technological change, that process of cultivation appears to have fallen out of step with innovation itself. Technology races ahead while culture struggles to accompany us, and we find ourselves moving through transformations that we have scarcely begun to comprehend. At times, it can feel as though technological culture has let go of our hand before teaching us how to walk within the world it is creating.

For centuries, much of Western thought has tended to privilege the mind over the matter. Thinking has often been imagined as an abstract cognitive activity, somehow separable from physical experience. Yet contemporary research across cognitive science, phenomenology and neuroscience increasingly challenges this assumption. Human thought does not occur independently of the body but emerges through continuous interactions between perception, movement, emotion, memory, language and the surrounding environment.

Importantly, contemporary science is not arriving at these insights in isolation. Across the world, diverse philosophical, medical and Indigenous traditions have long understood human beings as inseparable from their bodies, their communities and the environments they inhabit. Although these traditions differ profoundly in their histories and world views, many resist the sharp division between mind and body that has shaped much of modern Western thought. Rather than presenting cognition as an isolated mental process, they understand knowing as something enacted through relationships with other people, with place, with movement and with the living world. Contemporary discussions of embodiment therefore represent not only a scientific shift but also an opportunity to bring different knowledge traditions into a more meaningful dialogue.

The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty expressed this beautifully when he described the body as "our general medium for having a world." The phrase is deceptively simple. It reminds us that perception is never abstract. We do not first receive neutral information and then construct meaning from it. Rather, our bodies already situate us within meaningful relationships long before conscious reflection begins. We encounter the world through movement, gesture, rhythm, touch and shared presence. Cognition is therefore not detached from embodiment but inseparable from it.

Our bodies do not merely carry our minds through the world. They are among the primary conditions through which the world becomes meaningful in the first place. As more aspects of everyday life migrate into digital environments, this observation acquires renewed significance. Work, education, communication, entertainment and social relationships increasingly unfold through interfaces that privilege visual attention while reducing many other dimensions of embodied experience. The body remains present, of course, yet it often recedes from awareness as our attention becomes increasingly directed towards screens, symbolic representations and algorithmically organised environments. Perhaps this is why so many people describe a subtle sense of disorientation despite living in an age of extraordinary technological possibility.

This should not be understood as a nostalgic critique of digital technologies. Human culture has always transformed through technological innovation. Every new medium extends certain human capacities while quietly reshaping others. Every technological environment cultivates particular habits of perception while making alternative ways of engaging with the world more difficult. The challenge is therefore not to abandon technology, but to remain attentive to what it asks us to become.

The more our technologies participate in thinking, the more clearly we begin to see that being human has never been defined by thinking alone.

Art as a Practice of Becoming Human

It is here that artistic practice assumes renewed significance. Not because art offers an escape from technological culture, but because it cultivates capacities through which human beings come to inhabit the world. Every artistic discipline trains ways of attending, perceiving, sensing, imagining and relating that cannot be reduced to the production of an artistic object. A choreography is not only a dance. It is a practice of listening through the body. A painting is not merely an image. It is a way of learning to see. Music is not simply sound. It cultivates attention, memory and emotional attunement. Art does not simply express human experience. It develops the capacities through which experience itself becomes richer.

These capacities become increasingly significant as artificial intelligence assumes more cognitive and computational tasks. Art therefore does not compete with artificial intelligence by producing more information or more efficient solutions. It cultivates something different: the human capacities through which information becomes experience, and experience becomes meaning.

An artistic, or choreographic, process illustrates this particularly well. A rehearsal is not simply a sequence of decisions leading towards a finished performance. It is an environment within which perception itself gradually changes. Dancers learn not only new movements but new ways of sensing weight, space, rhythm and one another. Through repetition, feedback, structure and experimentation, the body acquires forms of knowledge that cannot be transmitted as information alone.

The performance, then, is not the work itself. It is the visible trace of a much richer process of becoming. Its significance lies not only in the artistic object eventually presented to an audience, but in the transformations that occur throughout its making. A choreography cultivates trust, attentiveness, patience, vulnerability and forms of collective embodied understanding that cannot be separated from the creative process itself. The artwork is not merely something that is produced. It is also something that produces people.

One Practice, Many Forms

Despite their different forms, dialogue, artistic practice and education share a common purpose: they cultivate ways of inhabiting the world. Their most enduring outcomes are often invisible. What remains long after the conversation ends, the rehearsal concludes or the classroom empties is not simply information or a finished product, but transformed ways of inhabiting the world.

What unites these practices is not what they produce, but how they produce it. Each asks us to attend, to question, to imagine, to relate and to remain open to transformation. Whether through conversation, artistic creation or learning, understanding emerges through participation rather than transmission. We are shaped not only by what we encounter, but by the ways we engage with it. Becoming, in this sense, is never a solitary or purely intellectual achievement. It is relational, embodied and fundamentally shared.

Yet becoming has never been a comfortable process. It is rarely linear. It resists certainty. It asks us to relinquish familiar ways of understanding before new ones have fully taken shape. This is why dialogue, education and artistic practice cannot be reduced to the efficient production of outcomes. They are practices through which we learn to inhabit uncertainty without surrendering our capacity for judgement, imagination and relationship.

Artificial intelligence does not replace this process. It makes its significance more visible. This is the paradox artificial intelligence reveals. The higher our technologies reach, the deeper our humanity must become. And perhaps this has always been the work of dialogue, education and art: not simply to expand what we know, but to cultivate who we are becoming.

Learning to Inhabit Expansion

If becoming human has always involved adapting to changing conditions, then artificial intelligence represents more than another technological innovation. It marks a profound redistribution of human cognition. As increasingly sophisticated systems assume aspects of remembering, calculating, organizing and generating information, they invite us to reconsider not only which forms of thinking remain distinctly our own, but how we choose to direct the cognitive freedom this creates.

Yet every expansion of technological capability also expands human responsibility. If intelligent systems increasingly participate in cognitive work, the central question is no longer whether we can delegate certain tasks, but what we choose to do with the space that delegation creates.

Freedom is never empty. Every task entrusted to technology opens possibilities that can be used either deliberately or unconsciously. If some forms of remembering, organizing and generating become increasingly shareable, then attention, judgement, imagination and relationships become matters of conscious choice rather than necessity, because these are the capacities through which embodied human beings continue to encounter and make meaning of the world.

Perhaps this is what it means to inhabit expansion. Not simply to witness increasingly capable technologies, but to recognize that every technological expansion also enlarges the horizon of human becoming. As some cognitive burdens become lighter, the opportunity, and responsibility, to cultivate distinctly human capacities becomes greater. Therefore, maybe the deepest significance of artificial intelligence is not that it challenges our intelligence, but that it gives us the opportunity to decide, with greater freedom than before, what we believe intelligence is ultimately for.

This is not an argument for placing the responsibility for technological change upon individuals alone. The ethical development of artificial intelligence and digital environments is a collective task involving institutions, education, policy and design. Yet within that collective transformation lies another possibility: to meet technological change not only with regulation and critique, but with consciousness and awe. To recognise this historical moment as an invitation to embrace the distinctly human capacities that technological progress itself cannot replace — capacities that have always mattered, but perhaps have never been more visible than they are now. Seen in this light, artificial intelligence is more than a technological milestone. It casts human development in a new light.

And if technology lets go of our hand, we must learn to hold one another's more tightly.

The question is not whether artificial intelligence will become more human. It is whether we will use this moment to become more fully human ourselves.

Author's note: This essay was itself developed through dialogue with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT (OpenAI) was used as an editorial collaborator to challenge arguments, and suggest structural revisions. The prose, ideas, interpretations and conclusions are the author's own.