AI Will Kill You But Not in a Way You Think
How to become human so we have relevance in the age of machines.
The Moment Awareness Struck
I was walking down a busy market road today, while visiting my hometown, to run some errands. The street pulsed with the chaotic energy of organized chaos that only Indian markets can orchestrate. Rain hung heavy in the monsoon air, and suddenly a smell hit me. One that took me back in time, one that I cannot quite explain, although I will try.
A complex symphony of scents: the metallic tang of the hardware district mixing with aroma wafting from street carts, the earthy smell of cardboard packing boxes, all saturated with the petrichor of approaching monsoon rains. In that instant, I travelled back in time, to my childhood, with the vivid precision that only memory triggered by sensory experience can achieve. It was startling in its clarity. I was suddenly conscious, acutely aware, drowning in pure nostalgia that felt more real than the present moment.
While writing this article, I looked up the meaning of awareness, not because I didn't know what it meant, but because I had just felt it so profoundly. According to formal definitions, awareness is "knowledge and perception of a situation or fact”. But that clinical description barely captures what I experienced, knowledge from the past colliding with present sensory input, memories intermingling to create something entirely unique, rooted in history but triggered by the immediate moment. This, I realized, is what being human actually means.
The Philosophical Divide Between Consciousness and Awareness
The distinction between consciousness and awareness isn't merely academic. It's the key to understanding why AI poses a fundamentally different threat than we imagine. Recent neuro-scientific research proposes that consciousness and awareness are distinctly different phenomena. Consciousness can be understood as "a dualistic, embodied, and embedded cognitive process," while awareness represents "a non-dual and non-local process”.
This distinction echoes through philosophical history. Descartes established the foundation with his famous cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”, positioning self-consciousness as fundamental to existence. But as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, this represents just one layer of human experience. Augustine had earlier argued that the mind "gains knowledge of itself through itself”, suggesting that self-awareness requires no external validation.
The crucial insight comes from understanding that awareness is absolute while consciousness is relative to the content and is always of something. While consciousness operates in the realm of subject-object duality, awareness transcends this limitation. As described in contemporary neuro-scientific literature, "non-local awareness is the ever-present, ever-fresh, and an affective self-awareness that can be aware of itself as well as of the ongoing subject-object duality”. This awareness represents our default mode state, though we are barely aware of it owing to our habitual mental preoccupation.
Even the late spiritual teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj captured this beautifully. “Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginning-less, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality.”
It is worth thinking of duality in the context of machines as well in order to appreciate better how machines can possibly become conscious.
The AI Consciousness Trap
Here's where conventional AI discourse goes astray. Even self-aware AI will tend toward consciousness rather than trueawareness in the way humans and animals experience it. Not the kind I felt on that rainy street. Current AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, operate within the realm of consciousness. They process information, recognize patterns, and even demonstrate forms of self-reference. But they remain trapped in the subject-object paradigm that defines consciousness.
Artificial General Intelligence will achieve remarkable forms of consciousness, potentially even self-awareness that rivalsor exceeds human cognitive capabilities. But there's a fundamental difference between computational self-awareness and the embodied, sensory-triggered, memory-laden awareness I experienced in that market street. AI consciousness, however advanced, operates through discrete computational processes. Human awareness emerges from the messy, unpredictable intersection of biology, emotion, memory, and sensory experience.
This isn't to diminish AGI's potential…quite the opposite. AI consciousness might offer unique advantages precisely because it's different. Computational consciousness can process information without the emotional baggage and cognitive biases that cloud human judgment. It might achieve forms of objective analysis that humans cannot match. But it will remain fundamentally different from the integrated, embodied awareness that characterizes biological intelligence.
Could AGI eventually breach this boundary? Possibly, but such development would require generations of AI systems co-existing and co-evolving with humans and animals. It might even take the intersection of such systems with biology. Also, it would demand computational advancement that current technology can barely imagine. We're talking about AI systems that don't just process sensory data but develop their own equivalent of smell-triggered nostalgia, their own forms of embodied memory. This transformation, if it happens at all, lies decades ahead.
AI Will Kill You But Not in a Way You Think
When everyone debates whether AI will destroy humanity through some dystopian robotic uprising or economic displacement, they're missing the real threat lurking in plain sight.
The true danger isn't that machines will become too powerful, it's that we're forgetting what makes us irreplaceably human. But here's the contrarian twist I have - this "death" might actually be our salvation, if we're smart enough to recognize what a majority of humans have been losing already - the ability to be aware and its corresponding application.
Humans in the Loop: Our Technical Lifeline
The real salvation lies in understanding Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) systems, where "humans are actively involved in the training, evaluation, or operation of ML models, providing valuable guidance, feedback, and annotations”. Technically, the "loop" refers to the continuous feedback cycle where human input directly influences AI decision-making processes. There are two arguments here. The first one is to train AI better and more thoughtfully, and the second one is how to make humans more capable and useful in the new scheme of things where they are aware and the ones skilled and relevant to train, calibrate and recalibrate machines.
HITL systems leverage human expertise in areas that require judgment, context and the handling of incomplete information. Consider medical diagnosis: while AI can analyze radiological images with superhuman precision, human doctors remain essential for interpreting results within the context of patient history, cultural factors, and intuitive pattern recognition that emerges from years of embodied clinical experience.
The uncomfortable truth remains though. Machines will indeed take over vast swaths of human jobs. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI may replace 300 million jobs globally, representing nearly 10% of all employment.
Nearly everything that constitutes routine white-collar work, like data analysis, report generation, basic coding, andcontent creation will be automated. However, the humans who remain in the loop will be those who can operate at the intersection of consciousness and awareness. They'll be the translators between AI's computational consciousness and human experiential awareness. These roles will demand not just technical skills but the uniquely human capacity to navigate ambiguity, cultural nuance, and ethical complexity that emerges from embodied experience.
The edge lies precisely in awareness transcending consciousness. When we operate from awareness rather than mere consciousness, we access forms of insight that emerge from our biological nature: intuition, empathy, and creative leaps that arise from the unpredictable intersection of memory, emotion and sensory experience.
The Blue-Collar Revolution
Blue-collar work faces equally dramatic disruption, though the timeline varies significantly. I passed by a hair salon today and found myself wondering when will robots cut my hair? The technology exists. Shane Wighton has already"programmed robots to cut hair as customers request" with "scissors attached to a lever rotate around the head" as "a vacuum holds the hair tightly”, The main limitation isn't technical capability but economics and consumer acceptance.
For someone like me, constantly moving between cities, robot hairdressers offer obvious advantages! Consistent quality regardless of location, no dependency on individual stylist skill levels and potentially faster service. When the economics align, when robot installations become cheaper than human labour plus benefits, the transition will be swift.
But where will the blue-collar edge remain? In the same place it always has: in the embodied awareness that comes from years of physical practice. A master carpenter doesn't just follow blueprints; they feel wood grain, sense structural integrity, and adapt to environmental conditions in ways that emerge from deeply embodied knowledge. A skilled mechanic listens to engine sounds with an awareness developed through thousands of tactile encounters with machinery.
The blue-collar workers who survive won't be those who compete with machines on speed or consistency. They'll be those who develop heightened awareness, who can troubleshoot the robots, teach the robots continuously, adapt to unique situations, and provide the contextual judgment that emerges from human-embodied experience. The essential message here is to develop elevated levels of skillfulness.
Preparing for the Awareness Economy
So what should humans do to prepare? Stop trying to compete with machines at their own game and start doing justice to what makes us irreplaceably human. The answer isn't just more technical training, it's becoming more aware. Radically, deeply aware.
This awareness isn't limited to traditionally "creative" fields like art or music. It extends to politics, to the unknown propagation of humanity, and to every possible domain of human experience. The key is learning in an unstructured way, feeding the brain diverse inputs and allowing natural pattern recognition to emerge. The more varied information we consume, the more connections our brains forge independently the more aware we become.
This process mirrors what neuroscientists describe as the default mode state: “peaceful, silent, fulfilling, energetic, and ever-fresh”. When we "relax, learn to meditate, let go of all preoccupations, and return to our default mode state of being," we access forms of awareness that no computational system can replicate.
The value of right-brain processing will skyrocket because AI "behaving right-brained" will always be derivative or mathematical. AI can generate art, compose music, even write poetry but these outputs emerge from pattern recognition and recombination rather than the lived experience that fuels human creativity. When AI creates, it draws from datasets. When humans create from awareness, they draw from the full spectrum of embodied existence, every smell-triggered memory, every emotional nuance, every moment of transcendent recognition.
The Contrarian Conclusion
Here's the ultimate irony: AI won't kill us through some dramatic technological singularity. It will kill us slowly, and quietly because we forgot what we're uniquely capable of. We have to elevate our game. We have to move away from so much that has become a template since the Industrial Revolution - learning by rote, valuing a template-based approach to life. The real threat isn't that machines will become too much like us, it's that we'll not up our game in time while machines overtake us in the space where a vast majority of us function today.
If we cultivate awareness rather than just consciousness, if we learn to value our embodied, messy, gloriously unpredictable human nature, then AI's rise SHOULD force us to become more fully human than we've ever been.
The question isn't whether AI will replace us. The question is whether we'll remember who we are before we disappear into our own computational mimicry. We have to remind ourselves never to lose touch with the embodied awareness that makes us irreplaceably, unpredictably, and magnificently human.
The machines are coming. The question is: will you be ready to be human?
Hard relate, this wraps it up so well! I have been discussing AI and future in bits and pieces with friends, colleagues and creatives. The reactions are all across the spectrum, but really I can’t wait to be “just human” again, haha.