What Happens When Machines Get Better at Being Human Than We Are?
Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events, or actual organizations is purely coincidental.
ChatGPT is the first chatbot I have heard people calling "my love". It is pretty disconcerting but also shows the shift of paradigm we are living in, getting away from the "economy of attention" and walking into "economy of intimacy". Just a few days ago at a gathering for entrepreneurs in the Chamber of Commerce, I heard a lady saying she refers to ChatGPT as "mon amour" which means "my lover". She was explaining that it is the only one around her that doesn't blame her for her forgetfulness, and provides constructive feedback without blame or negative emotional energy when she tells it something. It was startling yet real.
This isn't just about emotional dependency on machines. The economic transformation is already underway, and it's happening faster than most realize.
It isn't that far; we have 5 to 10 years and the change has already started. I no longer read my emails, I don't have an HR or talent acquisition team, the finance team is reduced to the minimum required, and the same goes for the software development teams. All the mundane tasks of reading, answering and classifying 95% of the emails are delegated to AI agents, resumes are scored by AI (most of which are even written by AI as well), and the Finance AI agent orchestrates a bunch of tools that it chooses from to calculate, clarify, extract data and present metrics.
Watching this technological displacement unfold in my own company, I kept thinking about historical parallels. That's when I returned to a book. I've been reading a fascinating book that has taken dust in my library for the past 8 years: "Les Vies Secrètes du Vieux Paris" (Secret Lives of Old Paris).
Progress Creates the Disposable
The parallels between our AI moment and Paris during the Industrial Revolution are haunting. Like today's tech leaders promising prosperity through automation, France's leaders made strikingly similar promises.
In 19th century Paris, Industrial Revolution was announced to be the path "to national renewal" and "getting rich". The prime minister of France François Guizot urged everyone to get wealthy through it "enrichissez-vous!", and monarchy started to invest heavily in railroads, mines, factories, and economic growth was considered the national strength and prestige. It brought the idea of economic modernisation, social optimism, national progress and deliverance from poverty.
But alongside these triumphalist narratives, in dark paved streets, some of which have changed names, others wiped off the map and replaced, many were displaced from rural areas to cities and adapting to the new lifestyle, eking out a brutal living out of city's waste.
A chiffonnier, for example, was literally a rag merchant who "collected at home or in the street rags, cardboard, metals, rabbit skins, feathers, old shoes, oils, old horseshoes, bones, horns, glass," and countless other discarded items. They formed a massive informal recycling industry, even though they were not recognised as such in the country. Their number grew through 1880s and the Paris region and suburbs counted 200,000 of these, men, women and children, with blackened faces, who worked day and night collecting refuse.
Historian Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont reported that out of 2.5 million inhabitants of Paris, about "70,000 persons of all ages do not know how they will eat or where they will sleep". In this context, many "petit métiers" (small survival jobs) arose. Anthropologists note that these roles were woven into the daily neighborhood network. Many ragpickers and other gig workers were displaced rural immigrants or city poor who had no better work, earning a few pennies a day. They needed no capital or employer, and in a sense, industrial modernisation of Parisian factories and market without a waste collecting system created the conditions for cheap labor and eking out a living from scraps.
What is fascinating is that this precarious crowd was a kind of "entrepreneur", finding an economic niche, putting spotlight on a product others needed, pitching, selling, performing and connecting other interested humans with a talent they had, or a gig they were selling, or a product they found useful to others. Professions like: bone collector, worm producer for Paris fishers or nightingale songbirds, bat (and rat) catchers, Ragpickers ("chiffoniers"), knock-uppers, street performers and Fairground Theaters … existed all through 19th and 20th century.
Infrastructure of Displacement
Reading about these forgotten lives, I realized we're witnessing the same economic displacement today, just with different tools and a digital facade.
The symbolic pattern is clear: when formal jobs are scarce, people create ad‑hoc gigs to survive, using whatever resources are at hand. Just as 19th‑century Parisians hawked goods from handcarts or belted out cries at dawn, modern workers offer on‑demand rides, quick errands or digital services via apps. Each age has its informal economy. The tools change from wooden stalls to smartphones or algorithms, but the core is the same: precarious, piecemeal labor connecting consumers and providers one small job at a time.
So many people are falling into the "AI intimacy" trap, without knowing that the flattery and matching the user's tone is a part of the AI specification. We are creating a class of economically obsolete humans, to whom the society will not offer meaningful alternatives, as we are building a world where money will flow to capital and not labor, and those who can't adapt to the speed will be left aside to scramble for digital crumbs.
My perspective on this pattern isn't just historical curiosity. I've spent decades watching automation transform industries from the inside, and the human cost follows predictable patterns.
I work with automation since 2000, where automating production plants through control systems engineering was my profession. I am drawn to optimizing systems, making things more efficient, transforming business through technology and changing my colleagues' lives - human lives - through better systems, automations, and efficient digital and IT, data-driven applications. When you have worked almost all of your career like me in industries such as oil & gas, nuclear and chemical, in companies with billions in revenue and hundreds of thousands of employees, you can be the testimony of how successful and failed transformations can impact not only the company bottom line but also the life of many humans, as we spend many hours at work.
Sitting at so many executive tables lately talking about AI transformation projects (automation, agents, machine learning, deep learning), I cannot ignore all the human impacts that this technology will bring to our society in the next few years, and I am drawn back to some apparently irrelevant material like "les vies secretes du vieux Paris" (secret lives of old Paris) to find lessons from the past.
This firsthand experience has led me to question the fundamental assumptions driving our rush toward artificial intelligence.
Much has been written about the human desire to create intelligent machines, with a noble narrative "not for profit but to surpass ourselves". We are building machines that outperform humans on listening, communicating, reasoning, mathematics and doing tasks; technology evolves every day with a new research paper in computer science and we are putting a lot of human power, human intelligence and human time - our most valuable asset - to make the machines more intelligent.
The Deeper Logic
The push for smarter machines echoes older colonial and industrial logics: to map, to extract and to optimise, first from land, then from bodies and now from data and behaviour, and we may argue that we build intelligent machines not because we want to be free, but because we are tired of the limits of other humans. We want a workforce that doesn't sleep, doesn't strike, doesn't demand rights, and doesn't remind us of our flaws. We have outsourced tasks at the beginning and now we are outsourcing “agency”, and we build something that is better at "being us". The ghost of industrial capitalism still haunts us; they've just learnt to speak in "algorithms".
But sitting in those academic presentations, surrounded by brilliant minds solving fascinating technical problems, a nagging voice grows louder in my head.
The human in me sometimes responds "maybe we shouldn't".
Whose problems are these machines solving and at what human costs?
Are we creating tools or are we building "our own replacement"?
Aren't we solving problems by creating bigger ones?
Aren't we romanticising intelligence and forgetting wisdom?
Isn't this only for a few who own the AI?
Aren't we moving faster than we can think?
Aren't we addicted to novelty, speed and illusion of control?
Perhaps we're building the final invention we'll ever need, before the world is no longer ours to run.
These aren't merely philosophical questions. The consequences are already visible around us, and history offers a disturbing preview of what's coming.
Will we return to the "Secret Lives of Old Paris", where poor people will be doing everything and anything for a few cents? The real danger isn't machines replacing us but the quiet reclassification of people into "non-essential" status, and if it scares you that is good, because we must redefine human values outside economic productivity and build systems that protect dignity.
One particular quote from that era captures the existential condition of such lives: "Ne faut-il pas plus de courage, en effet, pour venir pérorer dans la rue, monté sur un tabouret, que pour aller mourir à l'hôpital ?" [Les Vies Secrètes Du Vieux Paris, page 11]
"Does it not take more courage to speak publicly in the street, standing on a stool, than it does to go die in the hospital?"
This question is posed with bitter tenderness, speaking directly to the world we are building today. We no longer gather in public squares; instead, we log onto social platforms and productivity dashboards. The stool has been replaced by a livestream, a thread, a gig request. Yet the performance remains. And there is a particular kind of silence that follows the end of a performance, not one of indifference, but of fatigue. The kind of silence that comes after the street performer steps off the box, or the gig worker closes the app for the night, or the coder walks away from yet another long sprint of automation. It's the silence of someone wondering: was I seen, or was I just useful?
We struggle with ambiguity of human interactions. We seek control in a world that is painfully unpredictable. Codes are built in isolation. Tools promise to replace conversation, emotional labor, listening and caring; the very things many humans find unbearable in human interactions. But what is the cost of escaping emotional life? What happens when we can order empathy from a chatbot but can no longer tolerate it in our colleagues or families? What is the impact on children growing up in a world where wisdom is too slow to matter, where the loudest, fastest, most optimized signal always wins?
Choosing Wisdom
Understanding this historical pattern gives us a choice. We can learn from the ragpickers' resilience, or we can repeat the same mistakes with digital consequences.
The revival of wisdom begins with refusal: refusal to run, to race, to be reduced to metrics.
It begins with pausing and asking not "How do we make this more efficient?" but "Who is this for? Who might be left behind?" Wisdom is patient. It listens. It risks being irrelevant in the short term to remain meaningful in the long term. In this sense, resistance may not come from revolution, but from slowness, from communities that choose depth over visibility, care over scale, presence over optimisation. From people who decide that being human is not a bug in the system, but the whole point.
We shouldn't allow the technology to become our emotional coping strategy for a chaotic world, a shield against the messiness of human interactions, tools that reduce human frictions but also reduce depth and connection. Maybe the best skill to develop is patience, in a world so bewitched by the speed, and captivated by the "hamster cage rolling fast".
We must learn from the ragpickers, the charlatans, the poets of the streets, not because their lives were glamorous, but because they refused to disappear. They used whatever tools they had: storytelling, humor, charm, improvisation, to stay seen. In their resistance, they preserved something sacred: the right to exist, even when the system no longer knew where to place them.
Now it is our turn. Will we design systems that erase us or will we reclaim the right to be gloriously, inefficiently, stubbornly human?
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Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events, or actual organizations is purely coincidental.
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