👹 AI vs. Humanity: The Golden Rule Gets an Upgrade
Every day, I witness small but soul-sapping reminders that humanity is not, in fact, crushing it.
Someone parks diagonally across two spots, as if their Honda Civic is a rare exotic specimen that must be preserved in its natural habitat. Someone stops at the bottom of the escalator to check their phone, turning a moving staircase into a human accordion. Someone at the grocery store decides, right now, in front of me, that it is absolutely critical to have a five-minute philosophical debate with themselves about whether organic ketchup is really worth it.
These are not crimes against humanity, but they are crimes against my humanity. And probably yours too.
Now, into this delicate ecosystem of inconsideration and obliviousness, we have just unleashed artificial intelligence.
Which raises the question: will AI help us rise above our worst habits, or just turbocharge them?
AI as an Amplifier
Here’s the thing about AI: it is not magic, it is a mirror. Whatever you put in, it multiplies.
Smart person plus AI equals smarter, faster, more efficient.
Lazy person plus AI equals lazier, but now with bullet points.
Oblivious person plus AI equals obliviousness at industrial scale.
It is like a photocopier. If you feed in a crisp, well-typed document, it spits out clean copies. If you feed in a crumpled napkin with ketchup stains, congratulations, you now have 50 copies of your crumpled ketchup napkin.
So AI is not going to fix human flaws by default. It will just reproduce them, sometimes with suspiciously good grammar.
The Attention Deficit
One of the biggest human flaws AI is about to bump into is our goldfish-level attention spans.
We already outsource awareness to technology.
Can’t remember how to get across town? GPS will tell you, and also politely remind you you’ve missed the turn you’ve taken literally 87 times before.
Don’t know how to spell “definitely”? Autocorrect will swoop in, though half the time it decides you meant “defiantly,” which makes you sound oddly aggressive in your emails.
Can’t pick a movie? Netflix will pick one for you, ideally something “98% match” that you will still abandon after seven minutes.
AI could push this even further. Why notice the world around you when your digital assistant can do it for you? Why remember birthdays when your AI calendar pings you? Why practice basic object permanence when your shopping app will just remind you that, yes, you already bought peanut butter last week?
But there is a flip side. AI is really good at catching what we miss. It can notice patterns, biases, and blind spots we are too distracted to see. It might one day whisper: “Hey, you’ve been standing in front of the elevator for two full minutes without pressing the button. Maybe… press the button?”
So the question is whether AI will save our situational awareness, or make noticing the world optional.
Self-Centeredness on Steroids
AI is fantastic at personalization. Music, shopping, news, meal planning—everything can now be tailored exactly to your taste, mood, and dietary quirks.
Sounds great, right? Except society kind of runs on the opposite principle. We share space. We compromise. We tolerate each other’s bad music at parties because otherwise parties would be thirty people in thirty separate rooms listening to their own hyper-customized playlists.
When every digital experience becomes “me-shaped,” it is easy to forget that other people exist, people who are not, tragically, optimized around your preferences. AI could nudge us further into these bubbles, where empathy and patience shrink to the size of a TikTok window.
On the other hand, AI could expand our perspective by exposing us to voices and experiences we would never encounter otherwise. The same algorithm that builds your perfect indie-folk-meets-lofi playlist could also slip in a Congolese jazz track and make you think, huh, never knew I liked this.
The question is whether we let AI reinforce the “me, me, me” soundtrack of our lives, or use it to remind ourselves that other people matter too.
The Golden Rule 2.0
This is where the Golden Rule comes in. The old rule is simple: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But here is the challenge: AI-age self-centeredness might make us forget there are others. If your daily reality is 99 percent algorithmically designed to cater to you, then the Golden Rule becomes irrelevant, because why would you even think about anyone else?
Maybe we need an AI-upgraded Golden Rule.
Texting someone? AI could flag: “Your message reads as condescending. Want me to rephrase?”
Writing an email? AI might say: “This sentence could sound rude. Suggest softening.”
Standing in the grocery aisle? AI goggles could flash: “Hey champ, you’re blocking all three ketchups. Shift left.”
In other words, AI could become a kind of etiquette co-pilot, nudging us toward kindness and consideration.
Of course, that is also creepy. Imagine your phone whispering: “You would not want someone to cut you off in traffic, so maybe don’t floor it right now, Brad.” Helpful? Yes. Comforting? Not so much.
The danger is outsourcing morality the same way we outsourced spelling and directions. If AI becomes our conscience, do we actually grow kinder, or do we just let the machines fake kindness for us?
The Big Picture
AI will not save us from inconsideration, selfishness, or oblivion. Those are built-in human features, not software bugs.
What AI can do is amplify whatever qualities we bring to it. If we feed it curiosity, empathy, and creativity, it will multiply those. If we feed it laziness, selfishness, and obliviousness, we will simply get more of the same, but this time with predictive text and real-time translation.
So the real question is not whether AI will help or hurt humanity. The real question is whether we, as humans, remember to apply the Golden Rule before outsourcing our humanity to machines.
Because at the end of the day, AI will not destroy humanity. But if we forget how to treat each other like humans, we might do that part all by ourselves. AI will just help us do it faster, and probably with better grammar.
