The rise of sophisticated pattern-interpolation machines known as AI has prompted familiar anxieties about jobs, ownership, misinformation and human survival. Beneath these fears lies a deeper unease: what does it mean to be human in an age of supposedly intelligent machines capable of simulacra of art, love and philosophical thought? These were once considered the sole domain of human beings.

We should welcome this question, even as we confront the many dangers that come with AI, because our technologies speak to who we are as a species. Throughout history, our tools have reflected how we see ourselves, from stone tools shaped to fit the human hand to telescopes that sharpened our senses to behold the cosmos. To borrow from Star Trek, all invention is but an extension of humankind.

AI is no different. It is a mirror — a funhouse mirror, no doubt — reflecting our collective soul. Its distortions expose our biases, exclusions and aspirations alike.

As a keen observer of humanity, what I see in AI, and many tools of the modern world, are patterns that reflect how we relate to one another — patterns such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, national identity, sexuality and myriad others. These patterns tend towards acceptance, affirmation and even love in the face of perceived similarity. But they tend towards rejection, denial and, far too often, hate, when faced with difference, whether real or imagined.

Poet and theorist Audre Lorde cautioned about the dangers and harms caused by our lack of patterns for relating across our differences as equals. As a result of this lack, she said, our species has adopted and institutionalised the rejection of difference as a way of being. Coded into the fabric of our identities and societies, this hostility to difference has been with us for long enough to deceive us into believing it is a natural part of the human operating system. But there is little natural or innate about it.

Race, as one such supposed marker of difference that shapes how we relate, stepped into the timeline of humanity at a specific point that is more recent than many realise. It hasn’t always been with us, and it isn’t forever. And we have the power to move beyond it — not by pretending it doesn’t exist but by combatting its harmful effects while also revealing its fictions so that something truer might emerge.

So, if the problem is an operating system built on erroneous foundations, then the solution is not a software patch. We need to decode and recode ourselves. We need to seek and find new patterns of relating, patterns capacious enough to enable all living beings, and the ecosystems that sustain us, to flourish.

This is easier said than done, however. Our capacity to imagine is under assault. We’re told daily that current patterns are the best humanity can do. We’re warned that any attempt to change them will unleash chaos. Resistance is met by counter-resistance, resulting in clashes and inertia that is taken as proof that current ways of being are inevitable and forever.

But imagine we must. The imagination has always been central to liberation. Every leap in human freedom began as a feat of collective imagination. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the very idea of human rights. Each began with people — often artists, activists, thinkers, visionaries and ordinary people just seeking to live free — daring to imagine a world that did not yet exist. When the past and present offer no examples to follow, the imagination has always been where we looked to glimpse worlds that do not yet exist.

The same must happen now. This is our generational mission. And we dare not betray it.