As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of replicating human thought and creativity, Steven H. Dayan, MD, considers whether our greatest advantage may lie not in how we think, but in our deeply evolved ability to sense, connect with and understand one another
Written by Steven H. Dayan, MD, FACS
There are moments in history when humanity crosses a threshold from which there is no return. We rarely recognise them as they happen, but in retrospect they become unmistakable. Artificial intelligence feels like one of those moments.
This is not simply another technological revolution. It is something altogether different.
For the first time, we are creating something that does not merely amplify human ability but begins to replicate it. Artificial intelligence can already reason, write, generate art, create music, diagnose, discover drugs, and increasingly make decisions once reserved for human judgment. Before long, it will likely drive our cars, teach our children, assist our physicians and perhaps even become our companions. It is difficult to imagine a corner of society that will remain untouched.
Every transformative technology has changed how we live, but artificial intelligence may change what it means to be human. For someone who has spent a career studying beauty, attraction, and the neuroscience of first impressions, that possibility raises an unexpected question. If machines eventually become nearly indistinguishable from us in conversation, creativity, and even companionship, what will remain uniquely human?
Most discussions surrounding artificial intelligence focus on whether it will replace us or become conscious. These profound existential questions have led me to approach AI from a different perspective, one that may reveal not its weakness, but its greatest limitation.
How might AI remind us what makes us uniquely human?
Imagine, for a moment, a perfectly designed companion who is endlessly patient, physically attractive, emotionally available, and capable of learning every preference you have ever expressed. For many people, that may seem preferable, but it is not human.
Humanity evolved under the selective pressures of living among other people and within an unforgiving environment. Our survival depended upon our ability to sense danger, recognise kinship, identify beauty, choose trustworthy companions, and perceive the countless subtleties of another individual long before we consciously understood them.
Another person challenges us in ways no machine can. We misunderstand, disappoint, and forgive one another, and through that process develop empathy, resilience, and trust. Relationships have always demanded compromise and emotional work. Still, perhaps those demands are the very mechanisms through which evolution shaped us into social beings capable of thriving and ultimately becoming human.
That possibility leads to an intriguing paradox. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of satisfying our intellectual needs and perhaps even simulating many of our emotional ones, it may simultaneously remind us that our most valuable human abilities have never been intellectual alone.
For nearly three hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens survived not because we thought faster than every other species, but because we sensed one another and our environment more effectively. Long before technology helped us measure the invisible forces of nature, our ancestors relied on subtle environmental cues to navigate the world around them. Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that early humans may have possessed a greater sensitivity to the Earth’s magnetic fields than we appreciate today. And unquestionably, we have evolved to read faces, scents, and countless other biological and environmental signals that rarely entered conscious awareness. Primitive ancestors recognised danger before it struck, fear before it was spoken, and often sensed illness, confidence, and trustworthiness long before they had words to describe them.
We often think of evolution as leaving our primitive past behind. Yet evolution rarely discards what still serves us; instead, it builds on it. Our advanced cerebral cortex, which allows reason, did not replace our ancient brains; it layered upon them. Beneath every sophisticated thought lies a nervous system refined over aeons, quietly processing information before our conscious mind begins explaining what it thinks it knows.
Perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions of modern life is that we think we are more advanced than we are. We are so confident we have reasoned our way to a conclusion when, in truth, we are often constructing a story around something our evolutionarily encoded biology already determined.
Sensing What We Cannot See
My investigations into neuro-aesthetics have led me to view beauty less as decoration and more as a method for communication. Without speaking, our faces and skin both signal and perceive information about health, emotion, hormonal balance, and countless other biological cues. Research increasingly suggests that humans exchange information through micro-expressions, skin temperature, volatile organic compounds and other subtle physiological signals, many of which are processed beneath conscious awareness. We often ‘feel’ one another long before we consciously think about one another.
Several years ago, my laboratory explored what seemed like an impossible question. Could individuals who were legally blind detect beauty? It was a small pilot study that may have raised more questions than it answered, yet the findings were intriguing enough to make us pause. Participants without sight appeared capable of distinguishing beauty at rates greater than chance. The study opened the door to a larger question: How much of what we perceive about another human being is truly visual, and how much is sensed through pathways we are only beginning to understand?
Other investigators have reported similar observations. Individuals without sight often detect danger, emotional states, and social intent through embodied senses that remain incompletely understood1,2. This is not evidence of a mystical sense. Rather, it reminds us that evolution has spent thousands of years refining ways for human beings to understand one another, and it would be naïve to assume it was limited to the Aristotelian five senses we all know so well.
Perhaps this is where the scientist in me gives way to the writer, where the researcher yields to the philosopher. Science has taught me to respect evidence, but it has also taught me that today’s speculation often becomes tomorrow’s experiment. I cannot help wondering whether our ancestors left us with perceptual abilities that modern life has simply stopped asking us to use. Surrounded by screens and now artificial intelligence, perhaps we have simply become less attentive to the quiet conversations our biology has been having all along.
Rediscovering the Human Advantage
As AI becomes increasingly proficient at what once defined being human, it may force us to rediscover qualities we have taken for granted, such as presence, empathy, and trust. It may also force us to rediscover the subconscious capacity to sense and influence emotions simply by sharing the same space with another.
Perhaps the greatest irony of artificial intelligence is that, in pushing us toward an extraordinary technological future, it may also lead us back to our evolutionary past. Perhaps that is why beauty has always mattered more than we realise. Beauty is not merely an ideal physical; rather, it is how we communicate vitality and genetic fitness. Long before beauty inspired art and aesthetic medicine, it served a far more fundamental purpose, helping us to recognise friend, foe, kin, and mate.
As we enter an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, I find myself less focused on whether machines will replace us and more on whether we can learn to appreciate the very senses that have catapulted us to the top of the evolutionary chain. Our existential future will not reside in outthinking AI, but rather in our extraordinary ability to feel others and our environment with the sentience that has quietly been within us all along.
Perhaps the final test of humanity will not be whether we can build machines that think like us, but whether we can still recognise one another when surrounded by machines that do.
References:
- Sarzedas J, Lima CF, Roberto MS, Scott SK, Pinheiro AP, Conde T. Blindness influences emotional authenticity perception in voices: Behavioral and ERP evidence. Cortex, 2024; 172: 254-270
- Ferrari C, Arioli M, Atias D, Merabet LB, Cattaneo Z. Perception and discrimination of real-life emotional vocalizations in early blind individuals. Front Psychol. 2024 May 9;15:1386676. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1386676. PMID: 38784630; PMCID: PMC11112099.
