A meditation on technology, responsibility, and what keeps us human
When an Orangutan Put On Sunglasses
I recently watched a short clip that has stayed with me far longer than its few seconds of runtime. An orangutan, seated in a zoo enclosure, noticed a pair of sunglasses that had slipped from a visitor’s pocket. With deliberate care it picked them up, unfolded the arms, and settled the frames over its eyes, exactly as we would.
The gesture was uncannily precise, almost tender. And it made me wonder: did the animal understand that the dark lenses soften sunlight, or was it simply echoing what it had seen humans do thousands of times through the bars?
That tiny scene opened a door to a larger question: how often do we confuse imitation with understanding?
Why the Moment Feels So Familiar
Think about the latest wave of language‑based AI systems. Feed them enough examples of our conversations, essays, jokes, and code, and they reply with sentences so polished it feels as though a mind must be behind them. Increasingly, they are given the keys to act. Booking tickets, drafting emails, writing code on our behalf.
From the outside, the results look purposeful. Yet, beneath the fluent surface, do these systems know what they are doing, or are they, like the orangutan, performing a remarkably convincing mime?
Consequences Always Find a Human Address
Here’s the difference that matters: when a person makes a decision, the bill- emotional, ethical, or financial—arrives in that same person’s inbox.
A machine feels none of that. If an automated scheduler cancels a crucial medical appointment or an investment bot misreads market signals, the algorithm remains untouched. We, the users, bear the lost time, the missed diagnosis, the emptied bank account.
Call it a moral asymmetry: technology acts. People absorb the outcome.
Delegation vs. Abdication
Handing off drudgery is sensible, handing off judgment is riskier. The sharper these systems become, the more tempting it is to let them steer unsupervised.
- When budgeting apps re-balance our portfolios, will we still notice creeping fees or mismatched goals?
- When diagnostic tools suggest treatment plans, will clinicians pause to ask, Does this align with the whole patient in front of me?
- When writing assistants finish our sentences, will our own voice slowly fade?
Skills wither in the shade of convenience. Attention drifts. Over time, a supportive tool can morph into a quiet replacement, efficient yet flattening.
Keeping the Reins in Sight
The remedy is not to shun technology but to stay consciously in the loop. A few habits help:
- Pause for the “why.” Before accepting an automated suggestion, articulate in your own words—why it makes sense. If you can’t, dig deeper.
- Audit the edge cases. Intentionally test the strange inputs, the rare events, the unexpected user. That’s where systems reveal their blind spots.
- Rotate back to manual. Periodically perform a task without the tool. The exercise keeps intuition alive and surfaces drift you might otherwise miss.
These practices cost minutes, they repay with understanding.
My Own Guardrails
I lean on AI every day, for brainstorming, summarizing dense research, even nudging me toward better prose. I love the speed and the sparks of insight it offers.
But I also journal by hand, catch miss‑steps in its polished paragraphs, and remind myself that empathy never arrives from a silicon substrate. Convenience is welcome, dependency is not.
The Beauty of the Gap
The space between action and felt consequence is where accountability lives. It is where stories of failure teach, where remorse reshapes character, where celebration tastes sweet precisely because risk was real.
No matter how agile our tools become, that gap belongs to us. And in guarding it—tending it, we protect the texture of being human.
So, by all means, let the algorithms fetch, predict, summarize. Just remember to keep your hand on the tiller, your eyes on the horizon, and your heart firmly in the loop.
Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear where you choose to draw the line between help and hand‑over.
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