What Makes Us Human? Kate O’Neill on the H Word, Verbal Slop, and the Meaning of Tech Humanism

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Longtime viewers listening to the show know that one of the words I really strongly dislike or don't understand is the H word, humanism. It's a word that often gets thrown around by everyone, especially when, at least in my view, they don't know what they're talking about. And especially when it comes to tech, of course, in our age of AI, everyone now is a tech humanist of one kind or another. Certainly we haven't found anyone to come on the show who's a tech anti-humanist, at least willing to talk about it publicly. So I went to the source and I found the original, the platonic version of The Tech Humanist, which is Kate O'Neill. She was one of the first 100 people employed by Netflix. So she's an old-time tech person. She runs a podcast called The Tech Humanist Podcast. She has The Tech Humanist channel on YouTube. Of course, she has a book out called Tech Humanist, and she's joining us today. So Kate, what exactly does it mean? I'm sure I'm not alone in being skeptical, but I've always been particularly impatient with that term because it goes without saying, everyone's a humanist, aren't they?

**Kate O'Neill** (1:51)
I suppose that's true. I think there's something implicitly valuable about humans or humanity. It doesn't mean we're exclusively valuable and that nothing else that's natural is valuable or that no other living being is valuable. But I think in contrast to prioritizing business as a construct without prioritizing humanity, or prioritizing technologies advance without prioritizing the impacts to humanity. So I think these are the things that are in tension when you think about tech humanism is that technology shapes human experiences. This I think we can all agree on. But it shapes human experiences at scale when it is doing so in service of business, which it almost always is. So there's always a business objective behind it that is accelerating its advance and its march into human experiences. So what I think the purpose of tech humanism is, is to find the business objectives that need to be met and align them with human outcomes that can still be rewarding and fulfilling for people, and help the business leaders who are making those decisions, amplify instead of amplifying the business objectives, amplify the alignment between the business and the human outcomes. So we're using technology to make that alignment stronger as opposed to making the business simply more successful.
That's not necessarily something that many business leaders are in the habit of thinking about. So this is definitely a...

**Andrew Keen** (3:20)
Well, that is the kind of answer I would have got if I had fed it into ChatGPT or Claude.
Kate, I often ask my guests who talk about this subject, this question, could you convince me that you're not a bot? You sound like one. You don't look like one, but you sound like one. The kind of stuff you talk about, talk about at scale, you're a business consultant. What are you saying that a bot couldn't say? What are you saying that Claude couldn't say?

**Kate O'Neill** (3:50)
Well, for me, the thing that breaks it down is that human experience is really about meaning. And meaning is something that's unique to humanity. Like we don't know of any other non-human animal that really constitutes meaning the way we do, that thinks about what matters about a given interaction. They do at an instinctual level, but they're not doing it in a way that has to do with trying to understand context and having emotional intelligence about what another being is experiencing and trying to triangulate all of that into something that actually creates context.
That meaning and that we create that meaning through embodied sensory inputs and that it connects with language.

**Andrew Keen** (4:34)
So you've thrown out the M word along with the H word. Meaning, what does that mean?

**Kate O'Neill** (4:39)
Meaning means a lot of different things, but it means what matters at every level of what it means. Whether you're talking about semantic meaning or purpose or patterns or truth or significance, and all the way out to the most cosmic existential, what's it all about and why are we here?
We can talk about meaning at a lot of different levels, but it's always about something that has significance, that has intentionality or purpose. And that meaning is something that is always about what matters in the way we process it. So to me, that is core to the human experience.

**Andrew Keen** (5:13)
Yeah, and you haven't been shy to talk about this. You gave a popular TEDx speech recently about not leaving meaning to machines. But it seems as if we humans, for better or worse, are more and more dependent on machines for meaning.