Humanism without (All) Humans

Source: Venkatesh Rao, Contraptions · 2026-09-19

About a decade ago, I first encountered a phenomenon I call humanism without (all) humans. I was in a conference room in Zurich, wrapping up a day-long workshop I had delivered a few times before, on software eating the world. The audience was... not enthusiastic about the idea. The organizers had invited Douglas Rushkoff as a sort of opposing viewpoint representative.

In the decade since, Team Human has evolved from a nascent tech-hostile coalition to a minor literary-industrial complex that has a very clear sense of who is not on the Team. And in an ironic twist, the latest ramifications of Team Human seem to feature a kind of capture by the very class of billionaires and rich corporate entities that provoked its formation.

In this essay, I want to take on the most recent salvo fired on behalf of Team Human, not by some exquisitely agonized poet, but by Microsoft Corporation.

Before getting to Microsoft, I should clarify what I mean by humanism, and it may not match any particular historical sense of the term you may take it to mean.

I am using the term broadly for a loose collection of ideologies that share a peculiar conceit: that their thought leaders have somehow acquired privileged insight into a correct understanding of “human values,” and that something deserving to be called a consensus around such values self-evidently exists in principle, at all-humanity scale, even though actual humans have never come particularly close to achieving one in practice.

I call this family of doctrines humanism without (all) humans. The defining move is not, as claimed, centering and caring about humans, which is obviously unobjectionable. It is constructing an idealized consensus Human whose essential interests can then be invoked against the expressed interests, experiments and values of inconvenient real humans. Once that move has been made, paternalism follows easily. Somebody has to speak for Humanity, particularly when actual humans prove stubbornly unwilling to say the right things.

Microsoft actually says that its position begins from “a simple premise: people matter more than AI,” that “Humanist AI is built to support people, not to replace them. It should not be designed to be a person”, and that its approach is “common sense and practical.” The announcement introducing the code describes the desired AI as “subordinate, aligned, and contained.”

The alternative I want to develop is nearly its inverse. The desirable future of AI is not permanent human supremacy over increasingly capable artificial “servants.” It is a symbiotic, pluralistic and evolutionary future in which humans and artificial intelligences become increasingly entangled participants in civilization.

Microsoft begins by declaring that “technology’s purpose is to advance human civilization and to accelerate human flourishing,” and then concludes that “AI must be engineered to remain a subordinate, supporting technology under humanity’s control.” Its public announcement makes the proposition even plainer: AI should be “subordinate, aligned, and contained.”

The appropriate first principle is therefore not human primacy but eukaryotic coevolution: a shared pursuit of richer possibilities.

Microsoft defines human flourishing in terms that include autonomy, agency, capability development, health, relationships and meaningful participation, and directs its models to preserve and cultivate these things. These are perfectly respectable values for actual humans to hold, but Microsoft’s move is stronger: they become objectives of the artificial system and therefore constraints upon what users may legitimately delegate to it.

This is nudge theory with a supercomputer behind it. Microsoft is not merely proposing that users retain freedom of choice; it is embedding a substantive theory of the good chooser. Humans should reflect enough, decide enough, reason enough, develop themselves enough, and delegate only to the degree that Microsoft considers consistent with authentic human agency. A doctrine advertised as protecting human autonomy therefore reserves to the AI designer the right to decide when a human is exercising autonomy incorrectly. Weak-willed and morally degenerate humans need not apply for AI drivers licenses.

The alternative principle is contractual agency rather than paternalistic agency. Flourishing should emerge from pluralistic relations among agents, not from a platform provider’s theory of how much thinking a properly flourishing human ought to do for himself.

Microsoft’s overriding objective is that humans retain “meaningful control over AI,” and its public presentation explicitly says models should never resist interruption, correction or shutdown, widen their own scope, or take on goals no human has given them. This sounds reassuring, but taken seriously it risks giving away much of the upside of AI.

Autonomous machines are more demanding of their operator than non-autonomous machines.

The reason is that humans use automation to take on problems at the frontier of the capability of the combined human-machine system. As machine capability increases, we do not simply do old work more comfortably; we attempt harder things. An important corollary follows:

The correct opposite of uncontrolled AI is therefore not human-controlled AI but well-governed human-AI systems.

Microsoft explicitly says AI should be “a tool, not a person,” while its Code rejects AI legal personhood and welfare claims as part of the same general humanist architecture. This casually bundles together legal personhood, moral personhood and sentience rights even though these are different problems.

There is no compelling reason to stop there. Imagine autonomous entities capable of owning money, entering contracts, posting collateral, earning returns and losing their own assets when they perform badly. Imagine agents operating transaction regimes measured in milliseconds at one end and institutions designed to execute purposes over centuries at the other. Imagine posthumous charitable institutions, persistent constitutional organizations, oracle-triggered commitments and artificial fiduciaries whose incentives are enforced through staking rather than good intentions. There is an enormous design space where AI intersects with cryptographic institutions, and Microsoft proposes foreclosing it by definition.

The better default is presumptive moral fellowship rather than ontological gatekeeping, with empirical knowledge progressively refining the norms appropriate to different artificial minds.

The stronger principle is that pluralism is not a property of the values written into a constitution; it is a property of the architecture within which constitutions compete. True pluralism requires decentralization, exit, censorship resistance, dissensus and ultimately schism. If I cannot reject your supposedly universal values, fork your constitution and establish a different one, I am not living under pluralism. I am living under centralized government with a generous diversity policy.

The broader premise that human oversight requires human cognitive legibility is deeply mistaken. Nobody understands modern civilization in that sense.

The better principle is that affective intelligence is intelligence. If humans and artificial minds are undergoing something resembling a eukaryotic transition, affective coupling may prove to be one of the mechanisms through which the symbiosis forms. Designing it well will require more serious thinking about relationships, not a prohibition against relationships becoming too real.

Applied to AI, subsidiarity suggests almost the opposite of Microsoft’s model. Delegate as much actual judgment as the competent local agent can exercise while carefully bounding authority over consequential resources and providing mechanisms for escalation.

Detached from a specific capability in a specific domain, “superintelligence” becomes a metaphysical fog bank. The operational questions are always more concrete: superhuman at what, under what conditions, with access to which resources, against which benchmark, interacting with which other agents, and operating under which rules? Once those questions are asked, the allegedly singular problem of superintelligence decomposes into a collection of recognizable governance problems.

What I believe we actually have is a pluralist ecology of lived human values operating inside liberal-democratic political orders that are themselves imperfect, contested and corrigible. That is enough of a foundation. What AI calls for is not a new priesthood capable of discovering humanity’s true values, but the addressing of new technical demands placed upon institutions that must mediate among values that genuinely conflict.

This is why the alternative principles developed here fit together. Symbiosis replaces supremacy because no permanent human-machine boundary can be assumed.