The recent explosion of AI capacity, along with booming prophecies about its limitless potential, arrives at a moment of profound unease. Just over a century ago, in the aftermath of the First World War, W.B. Yeats gave poetic form to a similar anxiety. In The Second Coming, he described an old order unraveling; “the centre cannot hold,” and something new and uncertain is taking shape.
He imagined this new revelation in the form of a sphinx, rising from the desert sand, its gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun,” and ended the poem wondering “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Is AI, then, a new Copernican moment? Not because it moves us in the cosmos, but because it unsettles our sense of what makes us central, distinct, and human. What would it actually mean for AI to surpass us? We exercise judgment, form relationships, create culture, make meaning, and act from values and beliefs. As AI becomes more and more capable, which, if any, of these practices remain distinctly ours?
Philosopher and responsible AI leader Ken Archer, who heads Responsible AI at Microsoft, and Jackson Kernion, who leads the human feedback program at Anthropic, join literary scholar and BKC Faculty Associate Moira Weigel to consider whether Yeats’ apocalyptic vision has become not just “rough,” but rogue — and whether it will leave, or already has left, humanity behind. This conversation launches All Too Human: How AI Is Changing the Ways We Make Meaning, a year-long series examining how AI is reshaping our relationships, beliefs and values, art and creativity, and our most intimate emotional experiences.
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