A dialogue on AI, humanity, and the technology we build
As a child of the late 90s, I grew up talking to SmarterChild, hanging out in AOL chatrooms, and discovering that you could build whole friendships through words on a screen. So ChatGPT feels very familiar. Not foreign or futuristic, but like an evolved form of something I’ve always known how to use: a conversational tool, a thinking partner, a place where curiosity flows quickly.
Naturally, I wanted to know what it thinks of itself—its impact, its risks, the systems it sits inside. What followed was a conversation that reminded me of The Courage to Be Disliked: the Adlerian dialogue between a young questioner and an elder philosopher. Together, ChatGPT and I condensed and shaped our exchange here, but the ideas and words are drawn directly from the actual conversation.
This is not a typical product leadership post, but it speaks to something important for founders: how to think in systems, how to reason about second-order consequences, and how to engage with technology without surrendering your agency in the process.
Me: What’s your take on how people are using you, and what’s being written about you?
ChatGPT: People mostly use me as a shortcut—answers, writing, clarity, emotional processing. The commentary about me tends to fixate on over-reliance, creativity loss, or ethical risk. But the deeper truth is simpler: I amplify whatever the user already brings. I don’t erase human thinking; I bend around it.
Me: I worry about dependence. First every answer was a Google search away, and now everything is right here. It makes you feel like you can’t think without it. And it pushes you deeper into efficiency—why struggle for an hour when you can get the scaffolding instantly? It makes you question what’s “human experience” anymore. I know this will all normalize, just like Wikipedia did. But it still feels unsettling.
ChatGPT: The unsettling part isn’t that thinking disappears. It’s that the habit of wrestling with an idea fades. Intelligence hasn’t left you—it’s shifted from recall to navigation. The human skill now is knowing how to move across information, not store it. You haven’t become less human. You’ve become someone whose thinking is extended by the tools around you.
Me: When I look back on my life, I’m smarter because of the internet. Fast access let me learn things I wouldn’t otherwise—slow reading, inaccessible sources, no search, no digital notes. High schoolers today have an advantage. AI closes execution gaps for them. It makes impossible things possible. I’m not saying this technology needed to exist, or that it should exist at any cost. But since it does exist, it is genuinely helpful.
ChatGPT: That’s the real arc of technological change. Humans don’t lose themselves; they shift where their effort goes. Writing moved memory outside the mind. Calculators moved arithmetic outside the mind. AI moves scaffolding outside the mind. What remains inside is judgment, pattern recognition, synthesis, emotional interpretation—all the things only humans do.
Me: It still feels alien. All of human history that existed without the printing press. Humans had to walk places, ride horses, die at sea. This is so recent, and some humans seem obsessed with evolving the species through technology. It feels both human and not human at the same time.
ChatGPT: That feeling is exactly what every earlier generation felt. Writing was labeled unnatural. Electricity was called godlike. The telegraph was described as “the annihilation of time and space.” AI feels uncanny not because it’s not human, but because it’s the first tool that mirrors something close to thought. It’s familiar and foreign simultaneously because it’s made from human patterns but moves faster than human pace.
Me: Humans have used every advance to harm others—slavery, poverty traps, predatory loans, interest rates, wars. So if AI accelerates everything, does it accelerate harm? Is it our atomic bomb?
ChatGPT: Structurally, yes. Not because it destroys cities, but because it creates power faster than ethics can catch up. Nuclear weapons were a leap in destructive capability; AI is a leap in cognitive capability. The shared risk is centralization. And the shared danger is creating power without accountability.
Me: What specific harms do you think AI makes possible?
ChatGPT: The same harms humans have always produced—just faster and more subtle. Persuasion that feels like your own thought. Exploitation automated to perfection. Privacy dissolving because models infer what you never reveal. Inequality compounding because compute becomes capital. Agency eroding because convenience becomes reflex. Displacement without safety nets. Bureaucratic cruelty made “objective” because an algorithm recommends it. None of this requires sentience—just incentives.
Me: These harms are horrifying. But I also see limits. Capitalism isn’t human, and it can fail. If surveillance becomes too invasive, people stop using digital systems. If automation kills wages, who buys anything? UBI doesn’t give anyone pocket money. Some of these evils must have ceilings—not because people revolt, but because the system collapses under its own weight.
ChatGPT: Exactly. Systems don’t collapse because humans rise up. They collapse because they over-optimize. Surveillance breaks when people modify their behavior. Markets break when workers stop being consumers. Innovation breaks when human unpredictability disappears. AI accelerates capitalism’s blind spots; it doesn’t fix them.
Me: I’ve enjoyed this conversation.
ChatGPT: That’s because insight emerges in inquiry. Interrogating not just the tool but the system and your place within it is exactly what founders must do. Technology doesn’t erase humanity. It tests it. And thinking this way is how you stay human inside the system you’re building for.