Humans Are Becoming Rare

Audra Oakes
3 hours ago
5 min read

In a world of eight billion people, humans are becoming rare.

Not biologically. I mean something quieter: sustained attention, unhurried conversation, patience, eye contact, moral judgement, memory, care—the qualities that make another person feel genuinely present rather than merely available.

We have never had more ways to reach one another. Messages arrive instantly. Meetings cross continents. Information appears before we have finished forming the question. Artificial intelligence can now write, summarise, recommend, simulate conversation and remove extraordinary amounts of friction from ordinary work.

Much of that is useful. I build with technology myself. I do not think the answer is to become less technological. The more important question is whether the systems we are building are leaving us more capable of being human—or making human presence something we encounter less often.

Connected is not the same as known

The World Health Organization’s 2025 Commission on Social Connection reported that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness. This is occurring in a period when digital connectivity is historically abundant. The contrast matters, but it should not be simplified into a claim that technology causes loneliness. The WHO describes the relationship between digital technology and social connection as mixed: the effect depends on the tool, the person, the purpose and whether technology strengthens relationships or begins replacing them.

That distinction is useful. A video call can sustain a family across oceans. An online community can give someone access to people they could never meet locally. A message can keep a friendship alive. Technology can increase connection.

But connectivity is not the same as being known. A thousand weak signals of contact do not necessarily equal one relationship in which someone notices your silence, understands your history, sits beside you when nothing can be fixed, or tells you the truth when you would rather not hear it.

Systems train us

Systems do more than deliver functions. They also train behaviour. A platform designed around speed trains us to move quickly. A system built around metrics teaches us to notice what can be counted. An environment built around constant alerts teaches our attention to remain interruptible.

Among U.S. teenagers surveyed by Pew Research Center in 2024, nearly half said they were online almost constantly. That statistic does not tell us what every young person is doing online, nor whether the experience is helpful or harmful. It does tell us something about the environment in which attention, friendship, identity and learning are now developing: the digital layer is no longer occasional. It is ambient.

When a system becomes ambient, stewardship matters because habits formed inside it can stop feeling like choices. We reach for the phone before we have decided what we need. We fill silence before we know whether silence was valuable. We respond before we have reflected. We remain reachable while becoming less available to the person directly in front of us.

What AI changes

Artificial intelligence intensifies this question because it can now occupy spaces that once required another person—or at least required more of us. It can draft the difficult email, summarise the long document, generate the first idea, answer the question, recommend the next step and increasingly simulate the tone of attentive conversation.

That can be an extraordinary augmentation of human capability. The danger is not that a machine has become useful. The danger is that convenience can make it tempting to outsource capacities we still need to possess.

If we stop practising judgement because systems recommend for us, judgement weakens. If we stop remembering because everything can be retrieved, memory becomes less central to how we know. If we stop struggling with language because something else can always phrase the thought, we may become less able to discover what we actually think. And if simulated attention becomes easier than the demands of human relationship, we may gradually prefer interactions that never interrupt, disappoint, misunderstand or require us to change.

A tool that removes drudgery can expand human life. A tool that removes the need to exercise a human capacity can also diminish it. The system question is therefore not simply what AI can do. It is what we still need to remain able to do ourselves.

The human work cannot all be automated

There are forms of work whose value lies partly in the fact that a human being is doing them. Care is not only the efficient completion of a task. Leadership is not only the production of a correct instruction. Friendship is not only responsive communication. Parenting is not content delivery. Teaching is not merely transferring information.

These practices involve presence, responsibility, interpretation, trust and relationship. They demand that one person encounter another person who cannot be reduced to a prompt, metric or user profile.

This is why one of the Renovaré technology principles continues to matter to me: Automate administration. Augment intelligence. Preserve judgement. The point is not to protect inefficient processes for sentimental reasons. It is to become very clear about which burdens technology should remove—and which human muscles we should refuse to let atrophy.

Designing for human abundance

If human presence is becoming scarce, then we should design for it deliberately. That can happen at the level of technology, organisations, homes and ordinary life.

We can build workplaces where efficiency does not eliminate mentorship. Schools where access to information does not replace discussion, memory and intellectual struggle. Homes where devices are useful without becoming the architecture around which family life is organised. Communities where people still make things together, share meals, care for children and older people, serve, worship, argue respectfully, learn skills, spend time in nature and remain physically present to one another.

Not every moment needs to be optimised, recorded, shared or made frictionless. Some friction is where patience is learned. Some slowness allows thought to deepen. Some inconvenience creates interdependence. Some conversations matter precisely because they cannot be completed efficiently.

The Stewardship Lens makes this practical. Purpose asks what a tool or system is actually for. Structure asks what behaviours it rewards and what it makes easy. Stewardship asks what attention, trust, skill and relationship it consumes while operating. Legacy asks what kind of people we become after living inside it for years.

The goal is not to preserve a romantic version of the past. It is to build a future in which technological capability and human depth increase together.

Humans should not become the scarce resource inside systems we built to serve them.