AI vs. humans: A question of humanity

This is an installment of The Nightcrawler, a weekly collection of thought-provoking articles on tech, innovation, and long-term investing by Eric Markowitz of Nightview Capital. You can get articles like this one straight to your inbox every Friday evening by subscribing above. Follow him on X: @EricMarkowitz.

In a brilliant essay for Noema, philosopher Shannon Vallor dismantles the seductive myth of “superhuman” AI. We hear the phrase everywhere — from tech founders to policymakers — but Vallor warns it’s more than hype: it’s a quiet erosion of what it means to be human.

When we label machines as superhuman, we reduce ourselves to task-completing automatons and ignore the richness of consciousness, empathy, and moral imagination. To Vallor, this isn’t just a philosophical quibble.

As Vallor writes, “By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, we implicitly erase the concept of a ‘human.’” In a world obsessed with efficiency, we risk forgetting what really matters: not speed, but meaning. Her call is clear and urgent — before we let AI define us, we need to remember who we are.

Key quote: “Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside.”

Business and investing have largely become quantitative fields. Models, metrics, forecasts. We lean on numbers to make sense of a complex world.

But the best investors, leaders, and builders I know all share something else: intuition. They know when to trust a gut instinct. That’s why I loved Henry Wismayer’s recent piece, Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor, where he walks through Point Reyes with psychologist Dacher Keltner, whose research makes a compelling case for something we rarely talk about in business: awe and intuition.

Keltner’s work shows that awe isn’t just a poetic idea — it’s a real, measurable force that reduces stress and helps us see the bigger picture. At its core, intuition quiets the noise and re-centers what matters. In a world obsessed with optimization, Keltner argues that wonder might be just as essential. And if we want to make better decisions — not just faster ones — we have to make space for the non-quantifiable: intuition, emotion, mystery.

Key quote: “For the last two decades, Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has been a leading light of a scientific movement to examine our least-understood emotional state in all its gauzy complexity. His latest book, Awe, describes two decades of research and arrives at a radical conclusion. Far from being an undefinable caprice, awe, to Keltner, is a panacea, an evolutionary tool that holds the key to humanity’s capacity to flourish in groups.” 

OUTLAST field notes: What a 1,000-year-old university can teach us about business

Founded in 1088, the University of Bologna is the oldest university on Earth — and it’s still thriving. Why? Because it flipped the script.

Unlike top-down institutions, the University of Bologna was run by students. They hired the professors, set the agenda, and treated education as a mutual contract, not a mandate. It’s a model that’s lasted for nearly a millennium — and it suggests a radical blueprint for modern organizations. That spirit of shared governance still shapes the institution today. Students actively participate in decisions around curriculum, teaching quality, budgeting, and services. There’s a strong culture of dialogue between student groups and university leadership.

The University of Bologna reminds us: if you want to last, design for trust, not control.

A few more links I enjoyed:

How To Live Freely In A Goal-Obsessed World – via Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Key quote: “‍We live by unconscious mental scripts. Most of the time, we don’t even realize it, until we wake up and see the life we’re living isn’t what we truly want. So how do we unlearn what no longer serves us and rewire our mind to align with who we really are? [Topics covered include] Expect to learn what the problem is when people obsess over finding their purpose; how to know if you’re following your own dreams or someone else’s; the tactics you can learn to begin unlearning cultural scripts; how to get more comfortable with uncertainty; how to deal with the shame of letting go of busyness and driving toward your purpose; why posture is so overlooked in mental health; how to improve a destructive mindset; and much more.”

“For you, the Grail.” – via Tom Morgan

Key quote: “‍I suspect the most immediate benefit of technology generally, and artificial intelligence specifically, is that it will save us from the meaningless suffering of unconsciousness by reducing the drudgery of inhuman work. This might allow more of us to pursue the meaningful suffering of the deliberate evolution of consciousness. Knowledge work increasingly becomes wisdom work. I haven’t seen it in a pitch deck and it’s probably not the answer most of us want to hear. Even though I suspect it’s closer to the right one.”