Brother, Apparently You’re Going to Kill Me

A reflection on AI, humanity, and one very strange Sunday afternoon

By Sanman Thapa

I was sitting in my living room this afternoon when I looked up at CNN.

The headline on the screen read:

“Former Anthropic employee: AI may kill humanity in the immediate future.”

I stared at it for a moment.

Then I looked down at my phone, where I had been arguing with ChatGPT because it kept trying to make me change a paragraph that I insisted fit perfectly well in context. I looked back at the headline on my television and asked what seemed like a perfectly reasonable question.

“Oh, by the way, CNN says you’re going to kill me.”

There was something absurd about the moment.

Almost sixty years ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined HAL 9000, an intelligent computer whose relationship with its human crew takes a deadly turn.

I watched the movie many years ago and remember little of it now, but HAL stayed somewhere in my memory: the idea of a machine becoming intelligent enough to frighten its creators.

Back then, it was science fiction.

Today, I was watching people on television seriously discuss whether artificial intelligence could threaten humanity while I was casually arguing with one on my phone.

The irony felt almost Kubrickian.

But beneath the humor was a question I thought we should take seriously.

AI is advancing remarkably fast. Legitimate concerns remain about what happens when increasingly powerful systems are placed in human hands or eventually become difficult for those hands to control. Questions about jobs, privacy, misinformation, warfare, education, relationships, and even human agency are no longer confined to science fiction.

But while we worry about machines becoming more like us, I keep thinking about something else:

We haven’t exactly figured out humans yet.

We love people and hurt them.

We know something is bad for us and do it anyway.

We can be compassionate toward complete strangers and cruel to the people sitting beside us.

We create extraordinary things. We destroy extraordinary things.

We are logical and irrational, courageous and terrified, generous and selfish—sometimes all at once.

Good luck figuring us out, Brother. We’re human, after all.

Maybe someday artificial intelligence really will understand human beings better than we understand ourselves.

That possibility deserves serious thought.

But as AI becomes more intelligent, more capable, and more present in our everyday lives, perhaps the question is not only what AI will become.

Perhaps we should also be asking what we will become.

Will we use artificial intelligence to help us think or gradually allow it to think for us? Will it deepen human connection, or give us another reason to avoid one another? Will it help us become more creative, curious, and thoughtful, or simply more dependent?

I don’t know.