Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI Instead, we must actively cultivate change. That doesn’t mean moving forward indiscriminately under the assumption that things will sort themselves out in time. New technologies can and always have amplified negative emotions and behaviors that are just as essen- tially human as more aspirational emotions and behav- ior, like kindness, empathy, and reason. Imagine how deepfakes and simultaneous translation technologies might enable the scammers and political antagonists of the future. GPT-4: Yes, we must actively work to cultivate change. But we also need to remember that we’re not done defining humanity yet. Homo techne might be the way forward. But we’ll never know unless we keep moving— and keep talking. Technologies are never neutral. We embed the tools and systems we create with specific values and specific intents, and assume that they will produce specific outcomes. This doesn’t necessarily limit their potential uses. A car can be a weapon, a life-saving device, a place to sleep, and many other things, but that doesn’t make it “neutral.” Above everything else, a car is a technology that prioritizes effortless and extremely powerful mobility—and it ends up having much different impacts on the world than, say, a horse-drawn carriage or a bicycle. A core tenet for how I define techno-humanism involves striv- ing for outcomes that broadly benefit humanity. Of course that means being vigilant about the effects new technologies are likely to have. Rarely, however, are the narratives around technologies simple or clear-cut. In fact, that’s why the “technology is neutral” asser- tion can be so pervasive. You can use nuclear fusion in ways that 206