I, Human: On Being Stubbornly Human Alongside AI

We live in an age of mounting anxiety about what AI means for humanity. Yet, in face of imminent replacement, humanness is stubborn.

We live in an age of mounting anxiety about what AI means for humanity. Our creativity is being replaced, our judgment outsourced, our relationships simulated - or so we are told. This talk pushes back, not against AI, but against the ideas of imminent replacement. Humanness, I want to suggest, is stubborn. It persists not because we defend it, but because it is rooted in things that are not so easily dislodged — in our bodies, our idiosyncrasies, our situatedness in particular lives and relationships. A machine that can simulate empathy does not make empathy less real or less necessary. If anything, it reminds us what empathy actually is.Drawing on philosophy of technology and recent research on how people experience and respond to AI, this talk argues that the more interesting question is not whether AI will change us, but what it will make us think of ourselves. The greatest risk may not be replacement, but a kind of voluntary diminishment, quietly redefining what it means to be human to fit what machines can do.

Our speaker: Dr. Daria R. Morozova is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organisation at the Department of Business Studies, Leiden Law School, Leiden University. She holds a PhD in Management and HR from HEC Paris. Her research seeks to enable individuals and organizations to thrive creatively and socially as advanced technologies change and challenge the world around us. The research volume “Metahuman Creativity in Organizations” under Daria’s editorship is forthcoming in late 2026.Outside of academia, Daria does standup comedy and is a professionally trained contemporary artist.

ai-skeptics: a speaker series offering a space for critical reflections about the implications of artificial intelligence on research, work, and society

Co-organized by 4 curious ai-skeptics, Bianca Crivellini Eger, Anne-Laure Fayard, Sai Kalvapalle and Sam Ortiz Casillas, faculty members at Nova School of Business and Economics.

An email will be sent to participants the day before with the link to the online event.