AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice. | The Humanist Review of AI
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The architect as humanist builder: why AI can’t replace craft
AI is changing what we can do. Who we become is still our choice
To understand AI’s effect on moral character, ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah goes back to John Stuart Mill, and the idea that people are shaped by their choices.
Issue 01 Jul 15, 2026<br>People & Technology
Technologies that extend human powers may also, by degrees, erode the faculties they are meant to assist. Physicians who use AI to help detect adenomas during colonoscopies may become less adept at spotting anomalies on their own. They start to lose a skill. Yet if AI is always available, what really matters, surely, is whether doctors using AI do better than doctors did before AI arrived. And, in a range of cases, it seems that they do.[1]
New technologies often change the skills a job requires. The grizzled mechanic who could diagnose your old jalopy by ear had a valuable expertise, but that expertise lost value once computers began interpreting the data produced by modern vehicles. So, you might think that we should care only about whether the combination of human beings and technology leads to better results, even when that combination attenuates human skills.
More than a century and a half ago, John Stuart Mill argued that this view was incomplete. In On Liberty, published in 1859, he wrote:
It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.[2]
The route by which we arrive somewhere can shape us, and that shaping may itself be part of what matters.
For Mill, what people do may, in some cases, matter less than “what manner of men” they become in doing it. The route by which we arrive somewhere can shape us, and that shaping may itself be part of what matters. That’s because Mill espoused a broader ideal in which autonomy, individuality and the active cultivation of one’s faculties are constituents of a good human life, not merely useful tools for achieving it. A technology that alters how we think, judge, attend or feel may leave us diminished even when it improves performance.
Mill could not have had large language models in mind, of course. But he did imagine a world in which machines “fight battles” and “try causes”, a prospect that now sounds strikingly contemporary. In such a world, human beings would turn over not only labor but decision-making. We would no longer be shaped by doing difficult things and by making consequential decisions. That, Mill says with characteristic restraint, would be a “considerable loss.”
This concern had personal resonance for him. Mill had been subjected to one of the most rigorous educations in modern history. Raised by his father, political economist James Mill, under the influence of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, he was drilled from childhood in Greek, Latin, logic, history, political economy and philosophy. He became a savant, but he also came to fear that the process had made him mechanical, a kind of reasoning machine rather than a fully developed person. His account of a mental breakdown he experienced at the age of 20 suggests that he had been trained to think and perform, but not to...