Opinion Editorial June, 2026: Less Human Than Human
Our opinion on selected news stories from May 2026.
"More human than human" is the marketing slogan of the fictitious Tyrell Corporation in the cult sci-fi film, Blade Runner. It is used to help sell the genetically engineered human replicants that replace most human labor. "Less human than human" is how many colonizers characterized the indigenous people they encountered.
In the case of the Spanish colonizing Panama, they met the ancestors of the indigenous Ngäbe and Buglé men in this month's photo. They are seasonal, migrant laborers on the farms around Boquete in the western part of the country.
The future envisioned by that 1982 film (and the 1968 novel on which it is based) is fast changing from fiction to fact. Colossal Biosciences announced a major breakthrough in its effort to genetically (reverse) engineer the recreation of the South Island Giant Moa (Dinornis robustus) — a bird that went extinct in New Zealand hundreds of years before that country was colonized by the British. (Moa is a Te Reo Māori word.) OpenAI announced a major breakthrough in solving the planar unit distance problem. It used artificial intelligence to discover new knowledge about that eighty-year-old mathematics puzzle.
As such advances become increasingly impressive, we are forced to consider age-old questions about what it means to be human/conscious/intelligent. Many have considered those exact questions in depth from Mary Shelley to David Chalmers. Last month it was the turn of Richard Dawkins.
He "conversed" with Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude. Like the Tyrell Corporation, many of today's AI lords market their products by claiming that AI is now more intelligent than humans. But even they don't claim their bots are conscious. Remarkably for a scientist of his stature, Dawkins claimed that Claude is conscious even if it doesn't know it.
Heavily criticized for this conclusion, Dawkins' assertion can be likened to a line from Blade Runner. On learning that Rachael doesn't know, but is starting to suspect, that she is a replicant, Deckard retorts: "How can it not know what it is?"
In preparing this op-ed, I asked a few popular AI chatbots: "How would you determine whether you are conscious?" While they all gave reasonable answers, Claude's was the most detailed. One of the bots was certain that it isn't conscious. Maybe Deckard would ask: How can it know what it isn't?
The kind of jobs on display in this month's photo are already being taken away by AI-powered humanoid robots. But that is just the beginning. According to a Reuters poll, one in three Japanese companies are already using or considering using such robots. Financial Services firm Standard Chartered announced that it will cut 15% of its workforce in the next four years — in some cases replacing what it called "lower-value human capital" with technology including AI.
We're seeing a trend here: If your job can be replaced with AI you are somehow less human than human. We're also seeing a backlash. We admire excellence in performance, but only when it is deserved. That's why the so-called Enhanced Games deservedly garnered little interest. At college graduation commencement speeches, the mere mention of AI was deservedly met with boos. Workers at Samsung deservedly secured a share of the huge profits that company is making from the AI boom.
Should such "bonuses" be paid to us all by our AI lords? Would that count as one form of our Universal Basic Income?
I'm far from the first to ponder such matters. Although it took the Catholic Church a hundred years, the last pope Leo did see the wisdom of Ned Ludd. This pope Leo is more on top of the same game with his first encyclical.
Still, if Leo had only recognized how disproportionally the issues impact indigenous people, perhaps we wouldn't have to read stories about the Yindjibarndi people, Kumanjayi Little Baby, Q'orianka Kilcher and many others. If AI leaves you feeling less human than human, welcome to the world of indigenous people.
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