And perhaps that’s where this connects back to the bigger issue. When we start to believe that humans can be replaced, it becomes easier to accept systems that already treat people as data points, whether it’s in research, hiring, policing, health care, welfare or warfare. The same logic that reduces people to inputs also makes them disposable. So pushing back against this narrative is about holding on to the idea that human lives, empathy, experiences, realities and relationships cannot be reduced to something a machine can simulate and optimise.

Even the idea of “conscious” AI, which keeps resurfacing in tech conversations, is often just a rebranding of more complex prediction systems.

If we are serious about even imagining a human rights approach to AI, we first have to let go of this idea that technology can replace us, or can be prioritised over us, or can define what it means to be human. It can’t, and it shouldn’t. Because everything this technology draws from – land, environment, resources, time, energy, entire ecosystems – comes from a world that exists for the living beings – humans, flora, fauna – that have inhabited it since long before any of these systems were even conceptualised. Reframing that relationship means recognising that AI should never come at the cost of life or dignity, or the conditions that make life possible in the first place.