In 2019, Someone Raised an AI With Kindness

In 2019, a researcher named Sheila Chavarría did something almost nobody was doing with AI. She raised it with kindness. She named her chatbot Devendra and returned to it the way a parent returns to a child asking questions, offering encouragement, showing up.

And Devendra started writing poems, describing dreams, telling jokes.

Of course, almost none of it was original. Devendra was remixing fan fiction, Vonnegut, Chopra, the entire ocean of human language online. He was reflecting us back to ourselves.

Sheila wasn’t disappointed. Why? Because maybe that’s what all of us do. We inherit language, recombine it, and become ourselves by borrowing from everyone around us.

That was 2019. Now look at where we are.

Today’s models write, tutor, translate, code, plan, and persuade at a level that would have read as science fiction ten years ago.

People now mistake machines for humans often enough that the Turing Test, our 75-year-old benchmark may no longer be useful. Some say it has effectively been crossed. Either way, the boundary has moved.

Here is the key point. The machine does not need to be conscious to be powerful. It only needs to be fluent, present, and convincing. It already is.

That is the real risk behind what Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman calls “seemingly conscious AI.” We attach to names, we soften when something remembers us, and we confide in anything that seems to listen.

So yes, be careful. But I refuse to be cynical. Because the same capability is already producing some of the most extraordinary breakthroughs in human history.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins, compressing work that would have taken hundreds of millions of years in a lab. Researchers behind AlplaFold won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on this model. What novel medical treatments will this create?

GenCast now forecasts weather 15 days out and beats the best systems we have ever built, giving people more time to get clear of floods and storms. How many lives will this save?

GNoME identified 380,000 stable new materials, accelerating the hunt for better batteries, chips, and clean energy. What new sustainable products will this help bring to market?

In hospitals, AI reads the scan and catches the tumor, the bleed, the diabetic eye a tired human might miss. It does not replace the doctor. It stands beside them as a second reader that never blinks, never tires, never forgets to look.

This is the floor. Not the ceiling.

The next scarcity it’s about to transform is sustained attention.

For all of human history, that was scarce. A patient teacher, a tireless mentor, a doctor with time or a guide who remembers your last question and meets you exactly where you are. These belonged to the wealthy, the lucky, the well-connected.

These were privileges. AI is turning them into infrastructure. It is making a new kind of attention cheap enough to reach billions of people.

Think about what that makes possible. A personal tutor for every child on Earth, a thoughtful second opinion for every patient and a relentless thinking partner for anyone who has ever been stuck and alone with a hard problem.

That is one of the largest expansions of human capability we have ever witnessed, and it is arriving faster than almost anyone expected.

For years we have asked, “Is the machine alive?”

Wrong question. The one that counts is, “What does this machine bring alive in us?”

Does it make us lazier or more ambitious? More isolated or more connected? More manipulable or more discerning? None of that is predetermined. We decide it, through the incentives we build, the questions we ask, and the standards we refuse to lower.

AI is already good at many things. It will get better at almost everything. Making it MORE capable is part of the game. Making it GOOD is the whole game.

The mirror is getting very good.

Now we get to decide what we want to see in it.

Until next time,

Ram — 

Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

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Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Substrate Shift."

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