Man Has No Advantage Over the Beast (Eccles. 3:19)—What About the Machine?

AI may not be erasing human uniqueness. It may be revealing that we have been looking for it in the wrong place.

More than two thousand years before artificial intelligence, Qohelet posed an unsettling question about human uniqueness: וּמוֹתַר הָאָדָם מִן־הַבְּהֵמָה אָיִן (קהלת ג׳:י״ט). If human beings and animals share the same ultimate fate, what precisely gives humanity its special status?

For much of modern history, we had ready answers. Human beings reason. We create. We use language. We discover, judge, imagine, and make decisions. We understand the world and transform it.

One by one, artificial intelligence is making those answers less secure.

AI can now write an argument, compose music, generate images, identify patterns invisible to a scientist, propose new molecules, and assist in decisions once reserved for trained professionals. None of this proves that a machine thinks as a human being thinks, much less that it is conscious. But it forces a more difficult question: if intelligence is no longer sufficient to distinguish us, what is?

I have found myself returning to this question from an unusual direction. I began my professional life as a scientist, spending many years in biochemical research, including cancer research. I later moved into biotechnology, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and law. Now, in retirement, my research and writing increasingly bring me back to much older questions—to Qohelet, Genesis, and the biblical understanding of what it means to be human.

AI has made those ancient questions unexpectedly contemporary.

Perhaps our first mistake is assuming that human uniqueness must consist in superiority.

For centuries, we have identified some capacity—reason, language, calculation, creativity—and treated it as the boundary separating us from everything else. But such boundaries become unstable whenever another creature, or now a machine, displays some version of the same capacity. When computers surpassed us at chess, we could point to language. When AI acquired remarkable linguistic abilities, we could point to creativity. Now that machines generate images, music, and ideas, we search for another frontier.

This risks becoming an endless retreat.

Qohelet offers a different starting point. His declaration that humanity has “no advantage over the beast” occurs in the context of mortality. Whatever our intelligence, wealth, status, or achievement, we die. Human greatness does not release us from the fundamental conditions of creaturely existence.

Genesis approaches the question differently but with a related insight. Eden is framed by limits. Human beings may cultivate, name, know, and act, but not without boundaries. The two trees mark fundamental limits upon human existence: we do not possess unlimited knowledge, and we do not possess unlimited life.

Technology teaches us to challenge limits, often with extraordinary benefit. We cure disease, extend life, enhance our abilities, and overcome constraints that previous generations accepted as unavoidable. I spent much of my professional life in science and biotechnology, fields founded upon precisely that ambition.

But overcoming particular limitations is not the same as eliminating the conditions that make us human.

This is where AI raises the deeper question.

A machine does not confront time as we do. It does not grow old while considering a decision. It does not have children who will live after it. It does not stand beside someone it loves knowing that the encounter cannot be repeated indefinitely. It may calculate consequences, but it does not bear those consequences as part of a finite human life.

We do.

And that changes the meaning of judgment.

A decision matters not simply because one option is preferable to another, but because choosing one possibility may close others. Time moves in one direction. Some injuries cannot be undone. Some words cannot be recalled. Some opportunities do not return. Eventually, there is no more time in which to choose.

Finitude, therefore, is not merely an unfortunate constraint upon human intelligence. It is part of what gives human choice its ethical weight.

AI may advise us. It may predict consequences more accurately than we can. It may reveal possibilities that no unaided human mind would have discovered. But producing an answer and assuming responsibility for acting upon it are fundamentally different things.

A machine can increasingly tell us what can be done. The harder questions—what ought to be done, for whom, at what cost, and who must answer for the consequences—remain ours.

Perhaps, then, we should stop asking what humans can do that machines can never do. That question makes our humanity dependent upon winning a competition whose rules change with every technological advance.

We should ask instead what kind of beings we are.

We are embodied and vulnerable. We are born dependent upon others. We form relationships that matter partly because they can be lost. We act without complete knowledge and make choices whose consequences we cannot fully foresee. We live in time, knowing that our time is limited.

And because we act under these conditions, we are responsible.

Seen this way, AI does not abolish human uniqueness. Paradoxically, it may reveal that we have been looking for it in the wrong place.

Human dignity need not depend upon proving that no machine can ever equal a particular human intellectual achievement. Nor does it require denying Qohelet’s uncomfortable reminder that we share mortality with other living beings. What distinguishes human existence may lie less in what we can do than in the conditions under which we must choose, relate, and act.

AI will become more capable. It will perform more tasks once regarded as exclusively human. The important question, therefore, is not whether machines will become more like us.

It is what we will become as our machines become more capable.

Eden reminds us that human existence is bounded by knowledge and mortality. Qohelet reminds us that wisdom does not release us from those limits. AI now challenges us to reconsider whether human worth was ever properly measured by intelligence, power, or capability.

Perhaps the more capable our machines become, the more clearly we will see that human distinctiveness lies elsewhere: in living, choosing, and assuming responsibility within the limits of a finite life.

AI may increasingly help us determine what can be done. It remains for us to decide what should be done—and to answer for what happens next.