Growing up, there was always a boy.
Maybe it wasn’t a boy in your house. Maybe it was a girl, a cousin, a neighbor three doors down. But if you grew up in an Indian household, you know exactly who I mean. He got the best marks. He got into the good college. And every auntie, every uncle, every well-meaning relative at every family gathering would eventually turn to you and ask some version of: why can’t you be more like him?
I hadn’t thought about that boy in years. But, in a conversation with my dear friend Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Dean of the College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona, a person who has spent his whole career thinking about intelligence, technology, and what makes us human — he said “Today, AI is that boy.”
I was struck when he said it, because he's right, isn't he? AI writes faster. It never gets tired, never has a bad day, never needs a weekend. (It does, famously, make things up with total confidence — but then, so did the neighbor's boy.) Somewhere underneath all our talk about productivity and career disruption, a niggling voice has started asking the same question our aunties used to ask: why can't you be more like AI?
Unfair Comparison
Here’s the thing about the neighbor’s boy: he was only one kind of smart. He could ace an exam. He probably could not have told you why you were crying, or noticed when you needed someone to simply sit with you and say nothing at all.
Sandeep named the deeper problem in a single line:
“Artificial intelligence is singular. Human intelligences are plural.”
Artificial intelligence is, by its nature, built to produce whatever answer is most likely to satisfy you in the moment. But human intelligence was never singular. It’s plural. It’s the friend who can perform two hours of Shakespeare from memory. It’s the leader who walks into a room and somehow makes everyone in it feel more at ease. It’s the person who notices, before you’ve even said a word, that something in you feels off.
You cannot hold the same ruler up to that kind of variety and call the measurement meaningful. It wasn’t fair to compare you to the neighbor’s boy, and it isn’t a fair comparison now.
Intelligence, Not Consciousness
There's a second distinction hiding underneath the first. Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. Sandeep put it simply: AI acts as though it's intelligent. It performs understanding. It does not hold what he called, in Sanskrit, the jivatma — the living presence, the animating spark that enlivens us all.
No AI has ever made you feel instantly at ease the moment it walked into a room. No AI has ever made you feel truly seen and loved in an unconditional way. That is not insignificant. In fact, it might be the whole shebang.
This is Not a Competition
You don’t have to compete with the neighbor’s boy. You never did. That burden wasn’t yours to bear then, and it’s not yours to carry now.
So notice the places where your humanness — not your productive output — is the thing that actually matters. Lean into it. Be the one who sits with a struggling friend instead of rushing to fix them. Savor the moments when you are simply, fully present with another person, in a way no algorithm could ever be.
Sandeep left me with a phrase I haven’t been able to put down, and I’ll leave it with you:
I > AI.
The human is greater. Not your output. Not your speed. You — the whole, plural, conscious human that no system, however magnificent, can act its way into becoming.
So I'll leave you with a question, and I genuinely want your answers: What is one human quality you will never outsource — the thing you'll lean into as this world keeps changing? Share it in the comments. I have a feeling we'll learn more from each other's answers than from any algorithm.
If I > AI resonates with you, Sandeep and I go much deeper in the full conversation — what AI really means for your career, and why he believes artificial intimacy may prove more dangerous than artificial intelligence. Check it out!
