The Current - How to feel human in a tech world

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff sees potential in the disruption that's come along with AI. He says it's an opportunity for us to reclaim our humanity and our connection to each other — and even build a better world.

This is the sound of your legacy ERP. Silo data, broken processes, nothing works in harmony. With Workday, you get a next-gen ERP that unites your people in finance on a single AI platform so you can be future ready. Workday, the AI platform for HR and finance. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. You know, sometimes it feels like tech is part of almost every aspect of our lives. And the parts where it isn't, well, it's arriving there too.

People use artificial intelligence to apply for jobs. Then AI screens your application. You see a video online. You wonder, is it real or is it AI? You get a message. Maybe you wonder if a machine wrote it. We recently told you about AI in teddy bears. People even have romantic relationships with artificial intelligence.

Obviously, there is some appeal to this, but you might ask yourself where this is all heading, what our lives will be like in the near future, and how we might hold on to what makes us feel human in a world increasingly dominated by technology and the people who own it. Douglas Rushkoff does. He has been examining technology and culture since the early days of the internet. He's written books like Program or Be Programmed, Survival of the Richest and Team Human, which is also the name of his podcast. He's in New York.

Douglas, hello. Hey, good to be with you. Good to have you back on our program. You started out, as I said, back in the early days of the Internet in the 90s as an optimist about technology. What made you excited back then about the potential? Same things that make me excited about the potential now. Originally, I was interested in how technology helped us think differently about the world. So something as simple as hypertext, which was just the idea that, you know, instead of just reading a book that, you know,

you would be reading words and you could click on a word and it would take you somewhere else. And to me, that was such an exciting idea because it meant, you know, instead of just having footnotes in a book, it was as if every word or idea was linked to some other thought and some other thought so that the body of thought and references and knowledge was all connected in this big kind of fractal of idea. And I was excited by the idea that we were starting to connect and resonate with each other. And we were going to be able to move through information and ideas differently. Instead of whatever the official table of contents was for our reality,

now we were going to navigate it on our own terms and draw entirely new connections between things. Those were pretty great days. What happened? I mean, well, there's a lot of ways to frame it. I mean, one is a lot of us underestimated the power of capitalism. We kind of thought that the new environment would just change everything by itself. And it was really hard, especially for those of us in our teens and early 20s, to imagine how business was even going to come in and take over this place. It was even hard for. business to do it. I remember AT&T was offered the internet for like a buck 79 and they turned it down because they couldn't see a way to make money off people just connecting and talking and and socializing and playing games. It was looked at as a money sink. And I guess what went wrong is that some business people did figure out how to use it. They took this giant commons and kind of enclosed it,

into a business space. And, you know, it hasn't, it hasn't really looked back since. It's interesting that you use the word comments. I mean, is that how, is that how you saw that potential? People talked about that idea of a town square, a digital town square. And the town square in physical terms is, is a space in the commons, right? A place where we can all come together and ostensibly share our ideas back and forth. That's what you saw is the, the idea back then? Yeah, not just the idea, but the legal foundation of the internet. And if you wanted to go on the internet in the old days, you had to sign an agreement saying you were going to use it all for research purposes. You had to sign and declare that you wouldn't use it for any business or

commercial purposes. How do you understand the world that we live in now and how artificial intelligence is shaping that? I mean, it's a big, it's a big question, right? I think artificial intelligence does create another opportunity. If history is any guide, we as humans will not seize that opportunity. And I don't know how many more we get after this one. You know, we didn't really seize the opportunity of the open Internet. We went more into sort of walled gardens of one kind or another.

You see social media networks. We don't really use the Internet as it could have been. And I'm finding it hard. I'm fighting for it, but I'm finding it hard to believe we will take the, the genuine AI opportunity before us. The temptation with AI is, I guess the lowest one, is to just let it automate what we do. If you get an email now, it creates a potential response. You could just let it respond to that email message for you.

And then I wonder if it responds to the other person, then is the other person using Google to respond back to you? So I guess the idea is that you don't have to do your email, you just let your, your email AI, you have a conversation with the other people's email AI and you go to the beach. But no, it's not. The AI is at least as their program, certainly the ones that are coming from big corporations are not really looking at what do you need to better your life or to achieve autonomy and have agency. They're usually tuned towards what creates greater dependency on our tools. And as we've seen, the people who own these tools are not trustworthy human beings. They're kind of part of the worst aspects of the whatever we're looking at now, this American authoritarian cabal.

You've written that the dumb waiter is your favorite industrial age invention. And people might think, what is a dumb waiter? The thing that brings you the food from another floor have to do with AI. But connect those dots. Well, yeah, it's my favorite example of what the industrial age was really doing. doing. You know, AI, like the industrial age, was not really about saving labor. It was about disconnecting people from the value they create or making workers invisible. So the dumbwaiter was most famously in Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. It was a little elevator that you used to bring

food up from, you know, the kitchen or a lower level up to the dining room. And we were all taught, oh, isn't this a great invention because it saved Thomas Jefferson's slaves having to huff and puff up the stairs with all the food to bring it to people? They could just stick it in this device and crank it up. Then there it is magically. But that's not what was really being saved. The labor was still way down in the lower basements, you know, going through tunnels and up many staircases, you know, in order to get it to that little contraption. The dumbwaiter was really just sparing Thomas Jefferson and his guests the indignity of seeing the labor huffing and puffing and bringing it, the discomfort of seeing another human being enslaved. And AI is really currently anyway,

is no different. We do a prompt as if it's this magical thing coming back to us with, you know, effortlessly giving us an answer to some question. But there's more human beings behind the AI than there would be if you hired someone to answer the question. There's, as we know, there's all the enslaved children in the Congo, you know, digging for the rare earth metals to make this stuff. There's the people working on the water. There's all of the human beings in digital sweatshops tagging the data. You know, the data, the machines don't tag the data by themselves. There's human beings doing all of this work. So there's invisible armies of human beings making less money. So to a great extent, AI is just really camouflaging labor and resource depletion and energy expenditure in ways that we just don't see it.

And so in the face of that, you talk a lot about the idea of embracing team human. What does it mean to be human now in the face of, you know, the scaled up dumb waiter? It's interesting. For me, I hate to get, I don't know, spirit. or anything on you here. I'm supposed to be a, you know, Professor intellectual. But, you know, to be human,

to breathe, there's a difference between, you know, processing and storing data, which is what machines can do, and actually metabolizing and transforming data. You know, human beings, we're alive. We have respiration.

We have metabolisms. And we, can experience ideas and transform them and transform information into other things in ways that machines can't. Now, I'm, in spite of the way I sound sometimes that I sound critical, I'm still really excited about what these technologies can do if we use them really consciously and with agency and with an awareness of our human ingenuity and creativity. You know, Brian Eno, I remember when digital synthesizers came around, which were these

kind of sampled instruments. And everyone was upset, oh, no, now we've got these synthesizers. And now we don't need a real saxophone or a real pianist or a real violinist because we've got these digital things. And, you know, Brian Eno is one of the only artist artists who looked at the time. this and said, oh no, here's a new tool. And instead of just imitating instruments with these things, he went deep into what's called FM synthesis and made all of these other kinds of sounds and music. It's when he invented ambient music. And what it was called was generative arts so that you use

these technologies in a feedback loop where you do something, then the technology does something and you look at that output and it makes you think in a new way, then you create another input. put, then it comes back out again. So you iterate with it as a, as a partner. You know, he would describe it as like working with wind chimes. You know, you could blow into them and hear the way they sound and that's one way of interacting, or you could actually change the chimes themselves. So it's the same with AI. You can use lots of prompts and play with it, but then see how it's responding and then change the AI itself as a kind of a learning partner. So I think that conscious human beings who are entering into a relationship trying to expand their ability to ask

questions rather than just satisfy their impulse to get answers, they're the ones who are going to have a more human experience of these things. This is the sound of your legacy ERP. Nothing works in harmony. Now this is the sound of workday, a next-gen ERP that future proves your organization. Workday, the AI platform for HR and finance. It's been said that being neighbors with America is like sleeping with an elephant. One gets affected by every twitch and grunt.

Well, these days, there's a lot more than twitches and grunts in dealing with the U.S. I'm Paul Hunter. And I'm Katie Simpson. We're reporters here in Washington, and every Wednesday will bring you a smart conversation to help you make sense of how American politics are affecting Canada. Our new podcast is called Two Blocks from the White House. Find and follow now wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. This is a story about another tool in some ways.

Tell me the story about borrowing a drill from your neighbor. It was a year or so ago now. I had to hang my daughter's graduation picture. She just graduated high school. And I have these plaster walls and realized I needed a drill to actually hang this thing. And of course, you know, my first impulse like anybody else is, if you need a drill, you know, go to the Home Depot and find the minimum viable product, you know, rechargeable drill, buy it, you know, use it once and stick it in the garage and maybe

never take it out again or take it out in a year or two and it won't recharge because it's a piece of crap and, you know, throw it away. So in order to drill one hole in the wall, I've got, had a drill manufactured, again, back to those, you know, enslaved children in the Congo to get the parts for the rechargeable, battery and they assemble the whole thing with some giant carbon footprint. I bring it home. I use it once. And then it ends up dumped on a toxic waste heap in Brazil where some other child, you know, pilferes it to try to get the one renewable part, sell it to Apple so they can say they're renewable and create all this crap where I could have just, you know, walked down the street to my neighbor's house and, you know, knocked on his door and said, Bob, can I borrow your drill? You know,

because Bob is the guy with all the tools. He's always in his garage routing. He'd not only let me borrow his drill, but he'd probably say, you Rushkoff, you're a writer nerd. You don't know how to drill a hole. I'm going to come over to your house and find the stud and do a proper, he's going to come over. He's going to drill it.

And I put a drill plug in the wall like God intended, make the hole, and then hang up this picture better than I could. But then that weekend, and here's the fear. That weekend, when I'm having the barbecue party for my daughter, the graduation party, Bob's going to be in his garage. He's going to see. Look at Doug. He's having stakes and people over. I hung the damn picture of his daughter. He should invite me to his party. So, all right. So let's say I invite now. I invite Bob to the party. Now, Bob's at the party and his wife's there. And they're talking about what they did for me and how maybe now could I like help tutor their kid in algebra or do they want to come over. And then the neighbors are going to see. Wait a minute. Look, Doug's Gavin Bob over for his daughter's graduation party. Why didn't he invite us? I thought we're better friends.

So now, before long, I've got the whole block in my backyard at the party from my daughter. And this, at least in America, this is the nightmare. This is the thing we're afraid of that everybody's over. And once everybody's over and we start talking about how this started, how I borrowed a drill from Bob. And now that led to this chain of events where we're all over, someone's going to say, you know, what if we all borrowed tools from each other? Everyone on this block, we each have our own lawnmower. What if instead of, you know, everyone has to, you know, everyone has.

having their own lawnmower. We had one or two lawnmowers on the block, and then we shared them, because no one really uses it more than two hours a week. And all of a sudden, now we've got tool sharing, and we've got a favor bank. And I told this story at a talk of mostly like banker investor people, and someone got up and said, well, yeah, that all sounds nice and good, but what about the lawnmower company? What about the drill company? If you're buying less drills and lawnmowers, they're not making as much money. They're going to have to let people go. you know, even the old lady who's depending on the lawnmower company's stock for the dividends to live in her retirement, now you've pushed her into poverty.

It was interesting to me how hard it is for people to kind of wrap their heads around these ideas. But it's really, it's back to the comments that none of the technologies are a problem. It's just when are we using the technologies in order to simply to grow businesses rather than to serve human needs. Do you think people, I mean, and again, to your point, that can be a nightmare for some people. You might actually have to talk to somebody. You might have to put pants on and go to the store, rather than just order the drill from your home and never have to interact with people.

But is your sense that people have an appetite for that? Now, I was talking to Zadie Smith, the author Zadie Smith recently, and she said, I am on team human. And she admitted that that can sound radical, but it doesn't actually sound radical. Do you think people have an appetite for that now? It's funny. She's the only proper noun in my book, Team Human. She's the, you know, I didn't want to use any company names.

I don't talk about Google, Facebook. And then it's just, she had a quote. I just was like, all right, she gets it. Yes, I think people, I think people are back. There's, in some sense, two opposite responses to the dehumanization. One is for people to kind of try to race back to the last time they felt connected or the last thing they felt connected or the last thing they felt connected around a kind of a childlike nostalgia, this kind of false memory of, you know, nationalism or race or ethnicity or something that, oh, that myth of origin that held us together.

But there's a more mature way to move forward, which is actually moving into something more like intimacy and identification with other people. It's why on the back of my team human book, I use this. it's actually a Timothy Leary quote, find the others, you know, find the other people, make eye contact, learn to be with people, breathe with people. And when we live in such a desocialized environment, you know, people are, they're experiencing that sense of connection with their AI agents, at least it's someone who will talk to them and not judge them and engage with them, the more we lose that ability through social media and all the other things that we use

that are really not devised to help us socialize. They're devised to make us dependent on various media for simulations of social activity. I guess the more people long for, but the less people feel confident enough just to make eye contact with someone else, just to be in the room with someone else. I teach in college and we have these things called accommodations. And now every year I get more and more kids coming up that the accommodation is from their psychiatrist saying, you know, please excuse Johnny from conversation. He has, you know, social anxiety. Wow. Let him sit in the room. I understand where there's one or two, but when there's, you know, five or six kids out of 50 who have the accommodation not to participate, I wonder,

what were these kids doing in K through 12? You know, they were on their friggin iPad. Their teachers weren't taking advantage of having human beings in a space together. That part of school is learning to socialize, learning to be with other humans. You wrote this book of commands for the digital age that had advice for people who are living now. For somebody who says they don't know where to start, sure, borrow the drill or talk to people. But beyond that, what do we do to try to hang on to what makes us human? I mean, yeah, I have all my highfalutin ideas from that book program or be. programmed. And now what I'm thinking, it's almost much more somatic that what people really need to do.

And this sounds so unsatisfactory. But I promise, it really is at the beginning. You know, put your feet on the ground, you know, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Learn to make eye contact with other people. There's this game I play. I live in New York where I walk around in Midtown and I just watch to see if there's somebody else who's not on their phone, who's looking around. And I just make eye contact with them for a second and have that moment of like, oh, I'm here and you are too. You know, it's like, oh, wow, we're in the secret club. But a lot of it has really to do with that, to be embodied, to realize when you're using a technology, you are crossing over into a different space.

be critical of each one of these spaces and platforms. What does it want for me? Where's the money go? It's kind of basic critical thinking as you step into these environments. And realize that at every single pause, before you do anything that you type or say or do online, remember, this is your moment for intervention. These are your chances to intervene on the machine. It's a feedback loop.

and what you put in is going to come back out. So think every single time, how are you really answering? What do you really want? How do you want to be seen and ingested by this machine, by this network, by this corporation? And realize that that really is your power. But the more time that you're spending breathing and being with other people, really the more command you're going to want to take in those moments you have to intervene. It shouldn't sound radical, but it does to some people.

But it is, those are very, very practical things that people can do just on a daily basis. I think so, you know, before you swipe, before you type, before you click, before you like, what's going on? What do I want to do? What do I want here? I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you again. Thank you very much for this. All right. Be good.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC. slash podcasts.