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........

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