Why was I afraid of AI?

what AI can never take

The first reason is that it blurs the boundary between a human and a machine. At the beginning I tried to push away this feeling and frame it positively, but the fear stayed.

I had to ask why.

I realized that before answering the “why” of my own emotions, I needed to ask what makes a human a human. More specifically, what makes me unique.

Philosophers Have Been Asking This for Centuries — Now AI Forces Us to Ask Again

Plato and Aristotle called us rational souls;

Christian thinkers said we were made in God’s image;

Descartes saw us as consciousness itself;

Kant thought of us as moral agents.

Later, Heidegger and Sartre turned to mortality, while Merleau-Ponty reminded us that our body shapes our experience. Each tradition gave me a different lens.

Taken together, humans have been described as rational, moral, embodied, social, cultural, mortal, and meaning-seeking. There is no single answer, but each tradition highlights an axis of being human. AI unsettles this because it touches many of the definitions we used to protect our identity. AI can reason, analyze, and adapt. It even imitates neural networks while we do not fully understand our own brains. This combination of identity risk and uncertainty generates fear.

Uncertainty has always triggered fear.

In evolutionary terms, uncertainty about food or safety was tied to survival. Fear prepares us for danger.

now AI’s rapid performance growth feeds that same response.

Biologically, it felt like a survival response—my body bracing against something stronger. Psychologically, it was anxiety about losing control or relevance. Philosophically, it cut deepest, asking whether life still has meaning if machines can do everything we do. Fear isn’t just in the body or the mind—it’s layered, from survival to selfhood to meaning.

We ask whether it will replace us, whether we are still valuable, and what the point of being human is if machines perform everything better.

This fear is rooted in our fragility, our lack of control, and our awareness that life requires meaning.

Many of the classic answers to “what makes us human”—reason, creativity, culture, even moral rule-following—are now threatened by AI, which can already think, adapt, and create faster than almost any of us. Yet some dimensions remain beyond its reach: our fragility and mortality, the way suffering shapes meaning, the ethical responsibility we feel for one another, and the narrative of a finite life that only we can live.

In other words, AI may overtake our some core functions, but it cannot step into our existence. What makes us human is not just what we do but the way we are—mortal, vulnerable, and meaning-seeking.

We should stop competing with AI

Instead of trying to be smarter, we can focus on being human: living fully in finitude, cultivating meaning, and accepting vulnerability. AI should be a mirror, not a rival.

The question is no longer “how are we superior to machines” but “how do we live fully as humans?”

When I shift to this view, fear weakens. For example, I once asked AI what I might be excited about but had ignored. The answer pointed me to quiet sources of energy—deep focus on writing and building—that bring both productivity and meaning.

Fear dissolves when we stop comparing and start understanding. By standing with our fragility and mortality, and by seeking meaning rather than superiority, we reclaim what makes us human.

At first, AI blurred the boundary between human and machine and left me afraid. But now I see: the boundary was never about superiority — it was about mortality, meaning, and the fragile life only we can live.

What about you? When AI unsettles you, what part of being human do you hold on to?