I’ve been keeping an eye on artificial intelligence related stuff and most of it isn’t as important to write about as people who write about seem to think, so I haven’t really written much about it lately.

Yet the concept of the ‘median human’ is. I asked DeepAI to generate an image of ‘The Median Human’. It’s not what I pictured, and I doubt it’s what you pictured.

This has been being batted around quite a bit lately because Sam Altman has been accused of using the phrase, “median human” a lot. Articles like, “Sam Altman Plans To Replace Normal People With AI” abound, with people even trying to cash in on articles about the use of ‘Median Human’.

Well, it’s a silly phrase. It’s so silly, in fact, that DeepAI gave this response:

That’s exactly the problem with the phrase. I wrote, “Deviants” with that in mind, because grouping a standard deviation would make more sense. We live in a society where normal and medians do not necessarily exist except as concepts. ‘Normal’, though, has a range and is a bit more workable but it’s too difficult to conceptualize.

So let’s take a step back. Take a breath. The people who are being criticized for using the phrase ‘median human’ are the people who have access to loads of data about everyone who is connected to a device. To them, to even be considered ‘a median human’ would require internet connectivity and probably the collection of data from social media, gaming and shopping websites, as well as what sort of articles one reads on the Internet. Probably even the pornography viewed, to give you a disturbing idea of how much information exists within our digital shadows_¹.

With all that data, it is that data alone that might be what people spouting about median humans might be basing the median on, and that’s a lot of data but the data is incomplete. Humanity exists beyond the Internet, despite what some might say, and humanity isn’t necessarily what we are but what we aspire to.

Can the average human trek around Mars? Nope. But an artificial intelligence could, trained properly. Can an artificial intelligence create a human life through sexual intercourse with another artificial intelligence? Well, there’s an interesting variation of the Turing test.

What the use of the phrase really does is simplify thinking about humans, and myself and others would argue that it over-simplifies humans. It treats humans as commodities, things that fit neatly in boxes so that tech people can try to talk about humans… when really, they probably shouldn’t.

The real issue is discussing ‘replacing humans’. I’m all for an artificial intelligence doing stuff that I don’t want to do, but since people are tied to economies through jobs, giving artificial intelligences jobs through reducing human jobs leaves us with the same problem we started with:

People making a living in a world where our civilizations have been substituted for the natural environment we evolved within, where we’re still fighting like chimpanzees over the trees with the most fruit but the fruit to us is money.

Maybe we should spend less time worrying about ‘median humans’ and more time thinking about being human and what that means now, how it has changed, and what the future of that will be. Instead, everyone’s busy selling snake oil.

¹ Recommended read: “The Digital Person“, by Daniel Solove, a good starter for non-tech and tech people alike.