Day 1443
I just finished the first season of 3 Body Problem on Netflix. It’s a great show. Not to spoil anything, but if you haven’t watched it and plan on doing so, you may want to skip today’s Medium.
One of the more fascinating ideas the show touches on is simple but powerful. Humans have been trying to kill bugs forever, and yet they persist. No matter how many traps, chemicals, or clever solutions we invent, the bugs keep coming back. Now imagine an alien species that is far more technologically advanced than us. And for the sake of the thought experiment, imagine they looked at us the same way we look at bugs. If that were the case, it raises an interesting question: would we persist?
The human in me wants to say yes. Absolutely yes. Humanity has a strange habit of finding solutions only after we’ve exhausted every terrible option first. We procrastinate. We stumble. We argue. And then, at the very last possible moment, we figure it out. There is something oddly beautiful about that.
A much lower-stakes version of this idea came to mind today. I was listening to a podcast with someone I respect quite a bit in the AI world. He mentioned that he actually does not use AI to write. He uses it marginally for certain things, like double checking his grammar, but when it comes to prose he still writes it manually. His reasoning was simple: the models are not good enough yet to produce the kind of writing he wants to publish.
I found that both fascinating & surprising. This is someone clearly operating at the frontier of AI tools, someone who understands these systems deeply. And yet his conclusion, at least for now, is that the prose still needs a human mind behind it.
That suggests something important. Humanity tends to persist not because we are the strongest or the smartest in every moment, but because we adapt. We keep adjusting. We keep inserting ourselves back into the loop.
Better technologies, smarter machines, advanced aliens, or whatever else the universe throws at us are not guaranteed to replace us. More often they force us to sharpen the uniquely human parts of ourselves.
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If you ask me, that is actually a hopeful message.
It reminds me that being human is not something trivial. There is something beautiful in it. Something divine. And everyone, whether they admit it or not, likes feeling that their existence matters.
Some people will pretend otherwise. They will perform humility, acting as if believing in human significance is arrogance. But fake humility is often even worse than pride.
So accept a simple idea. You were given a strange and remarkable consciousness. A mind capable of wonder, frustration, creativity, and meaning. However you interpret it, something placed that spark inside you. And sparks tend to spread.
As above, so below.
3/4/26
Conor Jay Chepenik
