Homo-Mythos

With the convergence of artificial intelligence into nearly every aspect of human life, a fundamental question emerges:

What remains of humanness in an age where AI mimics, penetrates, and increasingly resembles us?

What happens when humanity is called to share its space with another form of intelligence? Will this encounter make us hostile? Or will it lead us toward something else entirely?

I have been returning to these questions for a long time.

What makes being human worth defending is not the physical dimension. That is already being replicated. What remains is far more difficult to hold onto: the capacity for transcendence.

By transcendence, I mean a way of encountering existence beyond function, beyond optimisation, beyond representation. A space where the limitations of the human condition begin to dissolve into the possibility of something greater. Something that remains beyond the reach of artificial intelligence and symbolic systems.

Throughout history, we have tried to define ourselves through different formulations: Homo Technicus, Homo Faber, Homo Economicus, Homo Sapiens. Each binds the human to something external. None fully captures the essence of being.

Not the unmediated encounter with our existential fears.

Not the possibility of becoming independent from the tools and structures of the material world.

I call this space Homo-Mythos.

It is not a new category, but a space we have not yet fully inhabited. A space where humans tap into their capacity for creativity, reinvention, and depth.

The path toward it is not straightforward. Traditionally, it has belonged to mystics, to those who step outside the dominant structures of their time.

The promise of Homo-Mythos is not to become something else. It is to become fully human, perhaps for the first time.

My argument is simple: we have never fully been alone with our humanity.

We have always shared our becoming. First with animals, and more recently with machines. This entanglement did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began much earlier, when we started externalising our capacities into tools.

From the Neolithic era onward, technology has acted as a mediator, shaping our evolution as we moved from tool-makers to industrial societies. While this trajectory appears as progress, it has not necessarily brought us closer to the deepest dimensions of human existence.

Many argue that industrialisation distanced us from our natural state of being. I do not fully agree.

The deeper truth may be that we never truly arrived there.

Our ancestors were not necessarily more connected. They were occupied. Their lives were shaped by survival. Their time was limited.

This is not to deny that they lived meaningful or spiritually rich lives. It is to recognise that the opportunity to engage deeply with the existential dimension of being was rarely available.

For the first time, however, technology has created a unique condition.

It has freed our attention.

The question is what we choose to do with it.

At this point, the question can no longer be avoided. If everything that once gave us stability is dissolving, then the problem is no longer only technological. It is existential.

What remains of the human being when everything that once defined it begins to dissolve?

This is where the inquiry begins.

At the time of writing, fragility feels omnipresent.

The psychological weight of global crises is real. New waves of technology arrive faster than we can make sense of them. Attention fragments. The inner world becomes saturated. It becomes harder to form stable identities, to stay focused, and to trust our own experience in a world that never stops moving.

And yet, within this uncertainty, a quiet hope remains.

If we dare to accept the call of this time, we can transform this collective pressure into resilience, belonging, and meaning. We can rediscover concentration, depth, and flow.

If we step back from the noise of the present and look at the long arc of history, another story begins to appear.

Our ancestors lived through cycles of collapse and renewal. Their lives were shaped by a persistent quest for survival, for mastering change, and for overcoming obstacles.

Mythology remembers this.

Our modern urbanised societies, which we often criticise or take for granted, exist because of this impulse. The impulse to overcome, to transform, to go beyond limitation appears again and again across human history.

One of its clearest expressions is Prometheus, who brought the divine gift of fire to humans, enabling them to shape nature, sustain themselves, and establish order.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley saw Prometheus as the highest expression of moral and intellectual nature, driven by the purest motives toward the noblest ends. If we take this seriously, Prometheus represents the human capacity to transform reality itself.

In a world governed by complex, non-linear change, Promethean acts do not remain contained. Every intervention carries consequences beyond what we can foresee. Yet each one also opens radical possibilities for forms of life that extend beyond our current limits.

This is the double-edged nature of our transition into the digital world.

It is dangerous.

But it is also irresistible.

The same technologies that destabilise our sense of self can also support life, if we choose to use them with care.