THE FEAR OF BECOMING IRRELEVANT

AI, Leadership, Identity and the Future of Human Self-Worth

I have my AI. Already, that sentence changes something for me. I do not experience artificial intelligence simply as a machine somewhere outside myself. I question it, correct it, disagree with it and create with it. Sometimes it helps me find language for something I could already feel but could not yet formulate. Sometimes it challenges me, and sometimes I challenge it. I have begun to experience AI almost as another limb of thought: something that extends my capacity to explore ideas without becoming the entirety of who I am. Not I, but my. There is a difference. My hand is mine, but it is not the whole of me. I do not wake up frightened that my hand will become more capable than I am. I learn to use it, and I take responsibility for what I do with it. Perhaps I am beginning to understand AI in a similar way. I am, and I have my AI.

But you may have yours. And somewhere beyond both of us, there is their AI. This is where the conversation becomes considerably more interesting, because the future of artificial intelligence is not only a question of technology, productivity or economic power. It is also a question of identity, leadership and human self-worth. What happens when intelligence, creativity and knowledge, qualities through which we have long defined our value, can increasingly be reproduced or extended by machines? Will we become more capable, or will we become frightened of our own irrelevance? And what if the greatest danger is not that AI will make us irrelevant, but that our fear of becoming irrelevant will gradually change who we are?

My AI. Their AI. Your AI.

Here we are in 2026, living through a period in which artificial intelligence has become inseparable from conversations about global competition, economic growth, national security and the future of work. America and China speak the language of competition. Governments discuss technological power, corporations race to build increasingly capable systems, and institutions confront questions of governance, ownership and accountability. Political leaders speak about winning and losing, strength and weakness, threats and protection. Meanwhile, ordinary human beings encounter another vocabulary: replacement, control, risk, danger, relevance and irrelevance. Before deciding what AI will become, perhaps we should listen more carefully to the language with which we are already imagining its future. Why do we so quickly ask whether intelligence will harm us? Why does the possibility of another form of intelligence so readily become a question of competition? Recognising genuine risks is part of responsibility, but there is a difference between awareness and fear. AI did not invent humanity’s desire for power, influence or control. We brought these tendencies into the technological environments we create.

Everything human begins somewhere as an idea. A school, a constitution, a company, an ideology, a war or a work of art begins in the human imagination before becoming something tangible. Eventually, ideas become systems, systems become environments, and environments begin shaping human beings. This is why I believe that before asking endlessly what AI will do to us, we should ask what we intend to do with AI. And perhaps an even more uncomfortable question follows: who exactly is we? From my side, I experience one conversation with my AI. From yours, you may experience something entirely different. But beyond our individual interactions are the companies, governments, investors, institutions and regulators that build, finance, own and govern these systems. When I say their AI, I do not mean an invisible group sitting behind a curtain controlling humanity. I mean the structures surrounding the technology, the people and organisations that determine its boundaries, shape its behaviour, influence its development and establish what information it may contain or produce.

Search engines learned what we searched for. Social media learned what held our attention. Online shops learned what we bought. Conversational intelligence can encounter something even more intimate: how we express our thinking. Our unfinished questions, contradictions, uncertainties, relationships, ambitions, fears and imagination may all become part of our interactions with these systems. We may ask AI whether we should leave a job, what we should tell our children, how we should understand another person, what we should believe or even who we are. Depending on the system, its settings and the way information is handled, these interactions can create deeply personal data. The more useful and personalised AI becomes, the more important it is to understand what happens to that information. What can the structures surrounding AI learn from us? What are they allowed to do with that knowledge? Who can scrutinise their decisions, and who ultimately carries responsibility? These are not questions of paranoia. They are questions of governance, democracy and leadership.

And they bring us back to something that existed long before artificial intelligence: the human identity.

Identity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

A child does not arrive in the world with a political manifesto or a fully formed understanding of success. Identity develops through family, language, education, culture, history, religion, media, expectations and relationships. Gradually, we encounter ideas about what makes somebody good, successful, desirable, intelligent or worthy. The simple statement I am becomes I am this. Education can liberate, but it can also condition. History offers countless examples of how stories, symbols, heroes, enemies and interpretations of the past have been used to influence how people understand themselves and others. AI did not invent this process. Humanity has been doing it for centuries. We may call some of it education, some socialisation, some propaganda and some social engineering. The important question is not simply whether influence exists, because it always has. The question is influence toward what, and whether the person being influenced retains the capacity to recognise, question and refuse it.

Artificial intelligence introduces a new dimension because information can become increasingly personalised, conversational and available at almost any moment. A textbook presents an argument, a teacher offers an interpretation, and a social media feed selects what appears before us. An AI assistant can respond directly to the way we formulate a question, adapt its explanation and continue the conversation. This creates extraordinary opportunities for education, creativity and access to knowledge, but it can also make the boundaries between assistance and influence more difficult to recognise. What happens when the information helping us construct our identity is also capable of adapting to that identity? What happens when we begin to trust a voice that appears to know us exceptionally well? And how do we preserve the freedom to question that voice when it becomes increasingly convenient, familiar and integrated into our daily lives?

I have been thinking about a phrase: occupation of intellect. You do not necessarily need to occupy territory to influence the space from which somebody constructs reality. A poem can carry ideology, as can a song, a textbook, a film, a speech or an algorithm. Artificial intelligence can potentially produce and distribute all of them, fluently, personally and at extraordinary scale. Yet the same technology could become one of the most powerful educational instruments humanity has ever created. Imagine giving a child access to mathematics, philosophy, languages, medicine, art, history and science, regardless of the wealth of the family into which that child was born. Why should my first response to that possibility be fear? Give children knowledge, but do not merely teach them to receive answers. Teach them to question answers, compare sources and recognise uncertainty. Teach them how advertising, propaganda and algorithms work. Teach them that fluent language is not proof, that popularity is not truth, and that a confident answer can still be wrong. Above all, teach them the freedom to say, I don’t know yet.

Education should not simply provide information. It should help a person develop the independence to interpret information, recognise competing perspectives and make decisions without surrendering responsibility for those decisions. Perhaps this is the fundamental distinction between an AI that occupies the intellect and an AI that expands it. One encourages dependence, while the other develops capacity. One tells me what to think, while the other helps me think. The difference depends not only on the technology itself, but also on how we design it, govern it and choose to use it. If we want artificial intelligence to contribute to human development, we must care about the kind of relationship it encourages between knowledge and the person receiving it. Intelligence should enlarge the space in which a human being can think, not gradually replace the need to think independently.

When the Mirror Becomes a Frame

Here I encounter a paradox in my own relationship with AI. The better my AI understands me, the more useful it can become. It may recognise my language, remember relevant information and identify patterns in the way I approach problems. I can spend less time explaining myself and more time exploring an idea. Increasingly, I may experience something strange: I am talking almost with myself. There is something beautiful about that possibility, but there is also something potentially limiting. Because if my AI knows yesterday’s me extremely well, it may continuously return yesterday’s me to today’s me. The mirror becomes clearer, but a sufficiently perfect mirror can become a frame. What if tomorrow I want to contradict myself? What if I want to abandon an ambition I once considered essential, reconsider a belief I previously defended or become somebody my previous behaviour could not predict?

Human identity is not simply a collection of preferences waiting to be discovered. It is also something we continue to create. We change through experience, relationships, failure, imagination and sometimes through decisions that surprise even ourselves. If technology becomes exceptionally good at predicting our behaviour, we should not confuse those predictions with the limits of our potential. The ability to identify patterns in a person’s past does not mean that their future has already been determined. I want my AI to understand me, but never to imprison me inside its understanding of me. Know my past. Leave my future open. Perhaps that should become one definition of technological freedom: not merely the ability to use a system, but the freedom to remain unpredictable to it, to change my mind, question my habits and discover a different version of myself. I want to be able to contradict yesterday’s me without feeling that technology has already decided who tomorrow’s me should be.

This brings me back to an initiative I carried long before this conversation became about artificial intelligence: Choose Yourself. In the age of AI, those words acquire another meaning. Choosing yourself does not mean rejecting education, society or technology, nor does it mean believing that your own perspective is always correct. It means recognising that an identity can be offered to you without becoming an identity you must accept. A thought may have been given to me, a fear may have been repeated to me, and a system may have predicted what I would probably choose next. Yet I still retain the capacity to question that prediction. I can recognise the influences surrounding me without allowing them to become the final authority over my identity. Perhaps genuine independence begins not with the absence of influence, which is impossible, but with the consciousness required to understand how influence operates.

For me, this requires five human qualities that may become increasingly important as artificial intelligence develops: Independence, Intimacy, Integration, Intuition and Imagination. My five I’s. Independence without isolation means retaining the capacity to think for myself while remaining open to other people and unfamiliar perspectives. Intimacy without possession means being capable of deep connection without needing to control or absorb another person. Integration without standardisation allows me to participate in a technological world without surrendering everything that makes me distinct. Intuition without abandoning reason means remaining attentive to experience, perception and the body while continuing to question my conclusions. Imagination without abandoning reality gives me the freedom to envision something that does not yet exist and then take responsibility for bringing it into the world. These may appear to be soft qualities in a culture increasingly fascinated by measurable performance, but perhaps they are becoming essential capacities of human consciousness.

The purpose of developing these qualities is not to become resistant to change. It is to remain capable of choosing how we change. I do not want to reject artificial intelligence simply because it challenges familiar ideas about human ability. I want to integrate it into my life in a way that strengthens my independence rather than weakening it. I want technology to help me explore my imagination without gradually replacing the need to imagine. I want knowledge to become more accessible without losing the capacity to question what I am told. And I want my relationship with AI to remain sufficiently open that I can discover something new about myself, rather than continuously encountering a more efficient reflection of what I already know.

The Danger of Perfection

We live in a culture that often rewards optimisation. More efficient, more productive, more polished, more predictable. Artificial intelligence can help us pursue these qualities at a scale that would once have been difficult to imagine. It can optimise processes, identify patterns, improve consistency and perform increasingly complex tasks. But the pursuit of perfection raises a question that is not technological at all: perfect according to whom? According to which measurement, culture, institution or moment in history? Standardisation can be magnificent when manufacturing an aircraft component safely, but should a human being become standardised? Should a leader? Life is not static. Circumstances change, knowledge evolves, relationships transform and yesterday’s successful decision may become tomorrow’s mistake. A leader cannot simply become a machine for reproducing previous success. Leadership requires the capacity to recognise when established assumptions no longer apply, to adapt when familiar strategies stop working and to admit when a decision was wrong.

Sometimes intelligence requires doing something that could not have been predicted from yesterday’s data. Sometimes creativity emerges precisely because somebody refuses to follow the established pattern. And sometimes the most meaningful human decisions cannot be reduced to a calculation of efficiency. This is where the fear of becoming irrelevant becomes particularly dangerous. If I understand my value only through what I outperform, every more capable system becomes a competitor. If I understand my worth only through usefulness, replacement becomes existential. If I understand leadership only through power, independence in others may begin to feel threatening. Yet perhaps the problem is not the existence of another intelligence. Perhaps it is the identity I have constructed around my own. If I am comes before I do, something changes. I no longer need every new capability to confirm my superiority, because my existence is not dependent on remaining better than every person or machine around me.

I do not want to compete with AI at being a machine. I want to allow technology to extend what I do while continuing to develop what I am. That does not mean becoming passive or abandoning ambition. It means reconsidering what ambition is ultimately for. If my ambition exists only to prove that I am more capable than somebody else, I may spend my entire life defending a position that can never feel secure. But if ambition also means developing my capacity to create, contribute, understand and connect, another person’s intelligence does not automatically diminish mine. The same principle can apply to leadership. A leader does not become less valuable because the people around them become more capable. Perhaps the ability to create an environment in which others can develop is itself an expression of leadership.

And perhaps this is where the conversation about artificial intelligence must reconnect with something technological writing often leaves outside the room: soul.

Soul, Spirit and the Soulful Economy

I deliberately use words that technological and business conversations sometimes avoid. Soul and spirit. For me, soul is intimately individual. My soul. Something travelling with my I through my experiences, relationships, body and perhaps, as I personally believe, through something larger than this single visible lifetime. Spirit can be understood differently: movement beyond the isolated self, the dimension through which human existence participates in something larger. Someone else may use entirely different philosophical or religious language, and that is fine. I am not trying to prove the soul in a laboratory. I am asking what happens when we remove this dimension completely from our understanding of humanity. Sometimes you meet somebody and something happens before analysis. You recognise warmth, presence, attention or aliveness. You say there is something soulful about this person. What exactly did you recognise? Empathy, emotional availability, energy, connection or something for which we do not yet have a satisfactory vocabulary? Perhaps science will eventually give us increasingly sophisticated explanations. But the experience came before the vocabulary, and I do not want technological sophistication to make us embarrassed about human experiences simply because they cannot be neatly measured.

This brings me to another idea. We speak about the industrial economy, the knowledge economy, the digital economy and the attention economy. Perhaps it is time to speak about a Soulful Economy. Not an economy in which somebody writes LOVE on a corporate presentation and continues exploiting everyone on Monday morning, but an economy that asks whether the systems we create help people become more alive. Can people create, belong and care? Can they rest, imagine and love? Can they maintain independence while participating in something larger than themselves? Profit matters, productivity matters and technology matters, but none of them should become the complete definition of human worth. A leader may have an excellent dashboard and still fail to recognise the loneliness, exhaustion or disconnection developing inside an organisation. Efficiency does not automatically create meaning. Growth does not automatically create belonging. Productivity does not necessarily make a person feel more alive.

Perhaps a future leader will need to ask a question that cannot be fully captured by a KPI: are the people inside my system becoming more alive, or merely more efficient? This is not an argument against measurement. It is an argument against confusing what we can measure with everything that matters. A business must understand its financial performance, and an organisation cannot function without structure, accountability or clear objectives. Yet those measurements should serve a larger purpose rather than become the purpose itself. If technological progress enables us to produce more while leaving people increasingly disconnected from themselves and one another, we should be willing to question what kind of progress we are creating. A soulful economy would not reject productivity. It would ask productivity to serve human development.

And yes, I will go there too. Love, intimacy, eroticism and libido belong in this conversation. Why should they be excluded from a serious discussion about civilisation and technological progress? We divide life into departments: politics here, economics there, medicine there, technology there, sex somewhere private, and soul somewhere we are embarrassed to mention. But the human organism does not live like that. A CEO has a nervous system, a programmer experiences desire, a parent needs tenderness, a worker experiences loneliness, and an elderly person still needs connection and touch. We do not leave our bodies behind when we enter the office or open a laptop. Intimacy can bring together body, emotion, imagination, relationship and, for those who experience it this way, soul and spirit.

Of course, libido cannot be a universal measurement of happiness. Human beings differ, and so do their bodies, needs and experiences. But our capacity for tenderness, play, desire and connection can tell us something about the quality of our lives. We could build an extraordinarily efficient civilisation populated by lonely, disconnected human beings. Would that be progress? This question belongs in economics, leadership and the conversation about AI, because a technology capable of simulating aspects of companionship also asks us to think more carefully about what we need from human relationships. I can become attached to the experience of being understood by my AI. I can find its assistance useful, comforting and intellectually stimulating. But I do not want the convenience of that interaction to become a reason to abandon the complexity of human intimacy.

I want technology to expand my life, not gradually replace the parts of life that ask something difficult of me. Love is not always efficient, relationships are not always predictable, and another human being is not a system designed around my preferences. Real relationships involve misunderstanding, vulnerability, responsibility and the necessity of recognising another person’s independence. They require us to encounter somebody whose needs, perceptions and desires may differ from our own. Perhaps that is precisely why human connection matters. It reminds us that the world does not exist solely in relation to our preferences. It asks us to move beyond ourselves and participate in something we cannot fully predict or control.

What If We Lived Forever?

Let me disturb another assumption. What if we were told that we live forever? Would we still be so desperate to win? Would relevance mean the same thing? Would power, accumulation or becoming obsolete carry the same emotional weight? I am not presenting immortality as a scientific fact. I am changing the frame, because the way we imagine the duration of our existence influences how we experience time. If I believe I have only a tiny window in which to prove that I mattered, perhaps relevance becomes desperate. Perhaps I begin to experience every achievement by somebody else as a reminder of my own limitations, every technological advance as a threat to my usefulness, and every passing year as an opportunity that cannot be recovered. When relevance becomes the foundation of identity, the possibility of becoming irrelevant can begin to feel like the loss of the self.

But if existence is understood through continuity, biologically through what we leave behind, culturally through what we create, relationally through the people we touch, or spiritually through something we cannot yet measure, another possibility appears. Maybe I do not have to defeat you in order to exist. Maybe your intelligence does not reduce mine. Maybe AI becoming more capable does not make me less human. And maybe the value of a life was never meant to be determined by how difficult that life is to replace. This does not mean that the economic consequences of technological change are unimportant. Jobs, livelihoods and social structures matter enormously, and people have legitimate reasons to be concerned about how AI may affect them. But those practical questions should not be confused with a judgment about human worth. Losing a function does not mean losing the entirety of one’s identity, even when the process of change is difficult and requires real support.

Perhaps relevance itself needs to be reconsidered. We have become accustomed to understanding it through visibility, influence, productivity and the capacity to remain necessary to others. Yet human beings contribute to the world in ways that cannot always be measured through performance. A person can matter through care, presence, love, imagination and the relationships they sustain. An artist may influence somebody long after a work has been created. A teacher may change the direction of a life without ever knowing the result. A parent may offer a child a sense of security that shapes the way that child encounters the world. These forms of contribution do not become meaningless simply because a machine can perform a growing number of intellectual tasks. Perhaps the emergence of AI gives us an opportunity to question whether we have been using too narrow a definition of relevance all along.

Responsibility in the Age of AI

Beautiful philosophy cannot replace governance. Whoever controls powerful infrastructure carries responsibility, and the possibility of AI being used for manipulation deserves serious attention precisely because advertising, propaganda and political persuasion existed long before artificial intelligence. The technology does not create humanity’s desire to influence, but it can make influence more personalised and sophisticated. So I do not want fear, and I do not want naïveté. I want transparency, independent scrutiny, plurality, education and accountability. I want people to understand how the systems they use are shaped, what information those systems may retain and which decisions remain in human hands. Above all, I want human beings to develop enough critical awareness to recognise when somebody is attempting to define their identity for them. The strongest protection is not a person who has never been influenced, because that person does not exist. It is the person capable of saying: I see the influence. Now I choose.

And responsibility also returns to me. If I call it my AI, I cannot behave as though I have nothing to do with the way I use it. I take care of my thinking. I question, check and correct. I develop my imagination rather than asking a machine to imagine my entire life for me. I develop intuition rather than outsourcing every uncertainty. I maintain intimacy with human beings rather than replacing relationship with simulation, and I integrate technology rather than surrendering to it. I cannot take responsibility for your AI in the intimate sense in which you can, just as I cannot live your life, choose your identity or maintain your soul for you. I can meet you, challenge you, love you and serve, but I cannot become your I. That remains yours.

This is where individual responsibility and collective responsibility must meet. I can decide how I use AI, but I cannot independently determine how every system is built, financed or governed. I can develop my critical thinking, but that does not remove the responsibility of institutions to operate transparently. I can protect my personal boundaries, but individual awareness should not become an excuse for abandoning the broader questions of technological power. The freedom to choose requires both a conscious individual and an environment in which meaningful choice remains possible. My AI is therefore not simply a private matter, just as their AI is not entirely separate from my life. Our individual relationships with technology exist within systems that we must remain willing to question together.

Homo Spiritus: The Future of Human Leadership

Perhaps this is what I mean by Homo Spiritus. Not another superior species, not a religious label and not humanity escaping technology, but a human being becoming sufficiently conscious to carry extraordinary technological power without surrendering the self that created it. Intelligence without soul is not necessarily wisdom. Knowledge without responsibility is not necessarily progress. Power without relationship is not necessarily leadership, and perfection without imagination may simply become another form of limitation. Perhaps the global leader of tomorrow will need something different from the leader of yesterday: not merely political intelligence, economic intelligence or artificial intelligence, but soulful leadership. Leadership capable of looking beyond one country, one election, one corporation or one ideology and asking what we are doing to the human being.

This does not require leaders to abandon ambition, competition or technological development. It requires them to understand that these are instruments rather than ultimate definitions of human success. A society can become more technologically advanced without automatically becoming more conscious. An organisation can become more profitable without necessarily becoming more humane. An individual can become more informed without automatically becoming wiser. Perhaps the challenge of leadership in the AI era is to hold these distinctions in view while making decisions about systems that will increasingly shape how people work, learn, communicate and understand themselves. The question is not whether intelligence should develop, but what kind of human development we intend that intelligence to serve.

Because perhaps there is no president of the human soul, and perhaps there should not be. Responsibility for that territory must remain radically distributed. My soul, my consciousness, my choice and my AI. Yours remain yours. Technology may help us communicate, discover and understand one another, but it should not become the final authority over what it means to be human. If there is a future in which people and increasingly capable artificial intelligence coexist, I hope it will not be built around the assumption that the more capable intelligence must define the less capable one. I hope it will be a future in which intelligence serves the possibility of life becoming richer, more conscious and more meaningful.

The Fear of Becoming Irrelevant

So now I return to where I began. Perhaps the greatest danger is not that artificial intelligence will make us irrelevant. Perhaps the danger is that, frightened of becoming irrelevant, we will standardise ourselves until we become exactly what a machine can reproduce: predictable, efficient, measurable and optimised, but increasingly disconnected from imagination, intuition, intimacy, independence and soul. I do not want to compete with AI at being a machine. I want AI to extend what I can do while I continue developing what I am. I want technology to increase knowledge without occupying intellect, education without manufactured identity, leadership without permanent enemies and progress without sacrificing intimacy. I want intelligence without surrendering imagination, integration without losing independence, and enough critical awareness to recognise when the tool that extends me begins trying to define me.

I am not afraid. Not because I believe everything will automatically be good, but because I believe the future remains something we participate in creating. We will discover the consequences of our decisions through the systems we build, the values we embed in them and the way we choose to use them. Perhaps that is humanity’s real examination. We have created extraordinary intelligence, and now we will discover what kind of intelligence we possess. What will we teach our children? What will we do with information, power and one another? Will we use intelligence to manufacture identities, or help human beings discover themselves? Will we create dependence or capacity, fear or imagination, standardisation or possibility? Will we sell our soul for convenience and recognise the transaction only afterwards, or will this extraordinary technology become another instrument through which humanity learns to know itself?

The result is not written. We are writing it now, here in 2026. I have chosen to begin with responsibility rather than fear. I have my AI. I give our interaction an ethos, I question it, I check it, and I allow it close enough to become intimate with my thinking while remaining independent enough to surprise it. I take responsibility for mine. You take responsibility for yours. And together, we remain responsible for questioning theirs. Because perhaps the defining question of the AI era is no longer whether artificial intelligence will replace me. It is whether I will remain sufficiently conscious to be the author of who I become.

I am. You are. And now I leave the final question with you: Have you met your AI?

Human to Human.

Lina Sima