What Writing HUMAN Taught Me About Staying Human in the Age of AI
By Justin Thomas
Writing a book called HUMAN at this exact moment in time felt a little ironic.
Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI. What it can do. What jobs it might replace. How much faster it can make us. Whether it is going to change everything.
And it probably will.
I use AI. I believe in technology. I work in environments where speed, data, automation, and scale matter a lot. I am not someone sitting on the sidelines hoping all of this goes away.
But while writing HUMAN: Being Human in a World That Is Becoming Less Human, I kept coming back to one question: Just because we can hand something over to technology, does that mean we should?
That question became a much bigger part of the book than I expected.
AI can help us write. It can help us think. It can organize information, create ideas, summarize conversations, analyze data, and probably do half the things we spend too much time doing every day.
That is incredibly useful.
But there are parts of being human that I do not think we should be in such a hurry to automate.
Empathy is one of them.
Technology can generate the right words. It can tell you what to say to someone who is hurting. But there is a difference between knowing the right words and actually caring enough to sit with someone when things are hard.
Judgment is another.
We can have more information than any generation before us, but somebody still has to make the decision. A leader still has to own the call. A parent still has to decide what is right for their child. A person still has to decide what kind of life they actually want.
You cannot outsource all of that.
The other thing I thought about a lot was attention.
We are constantly connected, but I am not sure we are always more connected to each other.
There is always another email, another notification, another post, another message, another thing telling us where to look next.
At some point, staying human may simply mean being able to put the phone down and actually be where you are.
That sounds simple. I do not think it is.
The more I wrote, the more I realized that AI is not really the villain in this story. We are still the ones making the choices.
Technology can make us faster, but we decide what we are rushing toward. It can make us more productive, but we decide what all of that productivity is for. It can help us achieve more, but we still have to decide what success actually means.
That idea also connects directly to my other book, The Cost of Success.
I wrote that book because I have always been ambitious. I believe in working hard. I believe in setting a high bar. I believe in pushing yourself.
But I also believe you can achieve a lot and still lose things you never meant to sacrifice along the way: your health, your relationships, your peace, your integrity, or your sense of who you are outside of what you accomplish.
AI is only going to make it easier for us to do more, faster.
Which means I think the question of why becomes even more important.
Why are we chasing the next thing? Why do we need more? What does enough actually look like? And who do we want to be when nobody is measuring our performance?
I do not think the future needs people to become better machines. The machines are going to win that competition.
I think the opportunity is the opposite: become more human.
Have the conversation instead of sending the text. Listen when somebody is talking instead of waiting for your turn. Make decisions you are willing to own. Protect the relationships that matter. Leave room in your life for things that are not productive, measurable, or optimized.
Use AI. Use technology. Take advantage of what it can do. I certainly will.
But do not hand over the parts of your life that make you who you are.
Because the biggest question may not be whether AI becomes more human. It may be whether we remember how to stay human.
Title: HUMAN: Being Human in a World That Is Becoming Less Human
Author: Justin Thomas
Blurb: We built a world that can answer almost any question. It cannot tell us what deserves our attention.We are living through one of the most extraordinary transitions in human history. Our machines can write, remember, predict, advise, and increasingly appear to understand us. But as they become more capable, a more intimate question remains: What must remain ours?
Moving through hospital rooms, classrooms, workplaces, family kitchens, moments of loneliness, and acts of unexpected courage, HUMAN explores what technology can give us—and what no technology can live for us.
Drawing on history, psychology, medicine, social science, and deeply human stories, Justin Thomas examines attention, connection, work, childhood, judgment, love, mortality, and the choices shaping our shared future. The result is neither a warning against technology nor a celebration of it. It is an invitation to build a world in which intelligence expands without diminishing wisdom, efficiency grows without erasing dignity, and connection becomes more than contact.
Beautifully designed and illustrated, HUMAN concludes with a practical framework readers can use to protect their attention, relationships, responsibility, and capacity for wonder.
This is not a book against the future. It is a book about becoming worthy of shaping it.
About the Author
Justin Thomas is a Colorado-based executive, author, and founder of JT’s Advisory Group. He is the author of HUMAN: Being Human in a World That Is Becoming Less Human and The Cost of Success: Finding Success Without Losing Yourself.
https://www.jtsadvisorygroup.com/human/
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