In 2018, I wrote about a “technological tsunami” that would reach us in the 2020s. At the time, the dominant refrain was still: “We are digitalizing,” “We are in the midst of digital transformation.” What I meant by this, however, was neither merely the speed of progress nor the sheer proliferation of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, biotechnology, or decentralized infrastructures emerging in parallel.

What was described in The Quantum Economy and later in The Infected Mind is now unfolding with force precisely where we long felt secure: in our explanations.

For a long time, its impact was barely perceptible as an event. It did not appear as a sudden explosion, nor as a clear rupture. Instead, it manifested as a shift. As a growing sense that our established concepts no longer hold. That explanations which once provided stability and orientation are losing their self-evidence. Inevitably, this shift leads to a question: What does it mean to be a Mensch?

When Our Tools Begin to Shape Us

Never before have our tools begun to intervene so deeply, so directly, and so autonomously in the human being itself. Artificial intelligence no longer confronts us merely as an instrument; it alters the very conditions under which we understand the world and ourselves. The moment these conditions shift, one insight becomes unavoidable: that we do not know what the human being is.

For much of this period, this uncertainty could be concealed. Technology has always shaped perception, thought, and action without fundamentally destabilizing our self-understanding. As long as it could be integrated into existing interpretive frameworks, the question of the human could be postponed. But this distance is now beginning to dissolve. What becomes visible is not a new certainty, but a void.

Artificial intelligence does not provide an answer to the question of the human. It intensifies it. It makes tangible how fragile concepts such as intelligence, consciousness, or creativity truly are. And it reveals how long we have contented ourselves with describing outcomes where genuine understanding was required.

Take the concept of creativity. When an AI model generates images within seconds that art experts perceive as original, or produces texts that are legally difficult to distinguish from human authorship, a certainty begins to waver.

Not because this would decide that machines are creative. But because it becomes apparent how long we have described creativity through its output rather than through its essence.

Where Certainty Ends

The more technical systems develop, the clearer it becomes how little is fixed. Not because technology explains the human being, but because the technical reproduction of what we long attributed to humans makes visible how unstable our prior notions of humanity actually were. In this situation, the question of the human cannot be resolved through concepts alone; it can only be taken seriously through experiment.

It is precisely from this stance that tomorrowmensch_ emerged. As a long-term experimental field. As a space in which, over years, we explore what being human might mean—not in order to define it, but to take it seriously in its enactment—at the moment we begin to consciously co-shape the conditions of life, intelligence, and infrastructure.

“My ambition is to build a human being—carried by the romantic notion that I will fail.”

Out of this friction emerges a paradox: it is by no means given that technology must fail. Nothing, in principle, forbids technical systems from reproducing everything that humans appear to do. A system need not be alive to simulate the behavior of the living. It need not experience consciousness to approximate its expressions almost perfectly.

The light can be on, the windows to the world can glow—and yet no one may be home. And still the system would function. It would act. It would perform. It would pass as “alive.”

Precisely for this reason, the claim is deliberately formulated as a paradox. Not to establish a standard, but to make visible where this attempt encounters its limit.

For such a failure would be the greatest discovery of all: the indication—at that very moment of perception—that the human possesses a quality that cannot be constructed, only lived. That being human does not reveal itself as an outcome, but in enactment, in becoming.

Perhaps it is exactly there that the true space of insight lies. Not in confirming what we already believe we know, but in the precise engagement with what cannot yet be determined. Not in defining the human, but in pursuing the possibility that being human cannot be fully specified—without knowing whether this indeterminacy is fundamental, or merely a limit of our current understanding.