“AI companies are taking advantage of our natural tendency to ascribe an inner life to our interlocutors. They profit when you think the chatbot cares.” — Kate O’Neill

If we don’t like someone, we call them a fascist. And if we like them, we say they are a humanist. The F and H words. Both meaningless in our sloppy, bot-infested age. But maybe I’m just a cranky anti-humanist. Even anti-human — whatever that means.

Or maybe I’m being harsh (moi?). Humanism certainly is all the rage in our AI age. Corporate consultant Kate O’Neill likes the word so much that she has built her brand around it. The self-styled “Tech Humanist” is the author of Tech Humanist, the host of the Tech Humanist Show, and a frequent speaker on the TED circuit.

So how to use the H word without sounding like Claude or ChatGPT? O’Neill argues that what makes us human is our quest for meaning. The M word. That’s what distinguishes us from the bots. But as Kazuo Ishiguro warns in Klara and the Sun, we are fast arriving at a point when the bots are better than us at extracting meaning from the world.

So did Kate O’Neill pass the Keen Test (reverse of Turing)? Did the Tech Humanist say anything that would have eluded Claude? Or have we already arrived at Ishiguro's bleak terminus where the bots are more skilled with infusing the H word with meaning than we are?

Five Takeaways

• What Is Tech Humanism? Align business objectives with human outcomes. Use technology to amplify that alignment rather than simply make the business more successful. Not the habit of most business leaders. A habit that can be developed.

• You Sound Like a Bot. Andrew’s challenge. O’Neill’s answer: meaning emerges from the combination of embodied sensory experience and language. Machines process statistically. Humans process meaningfully. That is the gap that matters.

• AI Companies Profit When You Think the Chatbot Cares. We are constituted to look for inner life in our interlocutors. AI companies exploit that tendency. The more you believe the chatbot understands you, the more you use it. Developing critical thinking about AI is now a form of self-defence.

• The Intersection of Meaning and Scale. A single biased algorithm is annoying. A billion such interactions, accelerated by a business objective, reshapes society. The tech humanist’s job: ensure that technology deployed at scale remains aligned with human meaning, not human attention extraction.

• A Message to 2126. What we valued: the ability to understand each other intellectually, emotionally, empathetically. To hold space for what another person feels. To create shared understanding through conversation, even when we disagree. Whether humans and machines are distinct or blended by then — that is what we hope they kept.

About the Guest

Kate O’Neill is founder and CEO of KO Insights, known as “the Tech Humanist,” and one of the first 100 employees at Netflix. Her most recent book is What Matters Next (Wiley, January 2025).

References

What Matters Next by Kate O’Neill (Wiley, January 2025): wiley.com
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 The h word and the m word
00:01:52 What does tech humanism mean?
00:03:22 You sound like a bot
00:03:51 Meaning is uniquely human
00:05:54 We ascribe inner life to our interlocutors
00:09:10 AI companies profit when you think the chatbot cares
00:35:41 Klara and the Sun
00:36:48 A message to 2126
00:39:51 Humans and machines as a blend