What Makes Us Human? Kate O’Neill on the H Word, Verbal Slop, and the Meaning of Tech Humanism

“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 at infusing the H word with meaning than we are?

Five Takeaways

•       What Is Tech Humanism? Aligning Business and Human Outcomes: O’Neill’s definition: technology shapes human experiences at scale, and it does so almost always in service of a business objective that is accelerating its advance. The purpose of tech humanism is to find the business objectives that need to be met and align them with human outcomes that are rewarding and fulfilling for people. This means using technology to amplify the alignment between business and human outcomes — rather than simply making the business more successful. It is, she acknowledges, not the habit of most business leaders. But it is a habit that can be developed.

•       You Sound Like a Bot: Andrew’s Challenge: Andrew’s opening challenge: O’Neill sounds exactly like a well-prompted language model. She uses the h word (humanism) and the m word (meaning). What is she saying that Claude couldn’t say? O’Neill’s answer: meaning is not a word but a phenomenon. It is what emerges from the combination of embodied sensory experience and language — the way humans encode meaningful experiences with language in their brains. As far as we know, this is a uniquely human capability. Machines process information statistically. Humans process it meaningfully. That distinction is, she argues, precisely the gap that matters.

•       AI Companies Profit When You Think the Chatbot Cares: O’Neill’s sharpest observation: we are constituted to look for inner life in the things we interact with. We give nicknames to our cars and talk to our toasters. At this early stage of interacting with large language models, it is entirely natural to assume there is a consciousness on the other side. The problem: AI companies are actively taking advantage of that natural tendency. They profit from it. The more people believe the chatbot genuinely understands them, the more they use it. That manipulation is real and it is working. Developing critical thinking about AI interactions is, O’Neill argues, now a form of self-defence.

•       The Intersection of Meaning and Scale: O’Neill’s key contribution to the tech humanism conversation: the problem with