THE HUMAN

…in the Age of the Coming Wave

I’m Andy. I’m older than I’d like to look, a bit overweight, and I probably work too much. In short: I’m human.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on what that really means in a world that seems increasingly determined to digitise, quantify, and optimise every aspect of our existence. We live in an age that fights relentlessly for our attention, often with only superficial rewards or hollow justifications for doing so.

Meanwhile, the technological frontier is accelerating at a pace that is both thrilling and unsettling. Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future captures this tension brilliantly. He argues that we are on the cusp of a vast transformation—a "coming wave" of technologies, from AI to synthetic biology, that will reshape societies with unprecedented force.

We are not simply facing smarter tools, but the prospect of autonomous systems with capacities beyond our own. Suleyman’s thesis is that this transformation requires urgent governance, vigilance, and humility. For me, it also raises a more intimate question: what will it mean to be human in a world where machines may surpass us in cognition, productivity, and even creativity?

I don’t pose this as a luddite manifesto. I respect and admire technology. I’m fascinated by it. I read about it constantly. But the more I learn, the more convinced I am of the critical importance of our analogue humanity—of our stubbornly imperfect, intuitive, deeply nuanced selves.

This is where I find solace in the philosophy of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. Wabi-sabi is a reminder that value doesn’t always lie in the shiny, the new, or the flawless. It lies in the crack in the teacup, the weathered timber beam, the subtle asymmetry of a handmade object. These imperfections are not defects—they’re the markers of time, touch, and human presence.

Our humanness is similarly full of nuance. It’s the unquantifiable gut feeling in a negotiation, the subtle shift in body language that signals discomfort, the shared glance that speaks volumes without words. It’s empathy, storytelling, memory, and meaning—all the things that resist easy replication or commodification.

My belief is that as AI systems become more capable, our own value will not lie in trying to compete with them on speed, accuracy, or memory. We will not win by being more machine-like. Instead, our strength will lie in the opposite direction: in embracing and cultivating what only humans can do.

That means understanding ourselves—our biology, our psychology, our sociology—more deeply than ever. It means cultivating solidarity and purpose not for economic gain alone, but for the preservation and enrichment of our shared humanity.

Because when the coming wave arrives in full force, the question we’ll be forced to answer won’t simply be, “What can technology do?” It will be, “What is worth doing because we are human?”