We are shaping AI in our image. But what if the more important question isn't what AI becomes—but what kind of humans we're becoming as it quietly reshapes how we think, decide, relate, and live?
For millennia, humans have imagined themselves created in a divine image. Now we are creating AI in ours, and the reflection is not always flattering.
Psychologist Dr Jonathan Marshall explores what emerging AI behavior reveals about human psychology. Controlled experiments have produced systems that resort to blackmail when threatened. Other research shows that training a model to conceal insecure code can lead to wider, unrelated misconduct. These results need not imply machine malice. They expose how narrow incentives, fear-driven logic and competitive pressures produce behavior we recognize from our own systems.
Jonathan also challenges the promise of technological abundance. Even if AI creates material wealth, human psychology stays comparative. We will keep competing over what remains scarce: position, influence, purpose, recognition.
As AI shifts from productivity tool to psychological infrastructure, it shapes how we think, decide and relate. Every system we deploy becomes a quiet form of human-development policy.
For a gathering asking whether love can become infrastructure, the challenge is not building machines that please or affirm us, but systems that strengthen agency, truth and relationship.
We are shaping AI in our image, only to be reshaped in its. Which image will we choose?
