Educating the Atomic Human

Neil D. Lawrence

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at UK Festival of Education, Wellington College on Jul 4, 2025 [reveal]

Neil D. Lawrence

Abstract

A vital perspective is missing from the discussions we’re having about Artificial Intelligence: what does it mean for our identity?

Our fascination with AI stems from the perceived uniqueness of human intelligence. We believe it’s what differentiates us. Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world.

Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is ‘atom’). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity.

By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people.

The thinking in this talk comes from Neil’s book The Atomic Human.

Either AI is a tool for us, or we become a tool of AI. Understanding this will enable us to choose the future we want.

Figure: The hippocampus within the brain. Image generated from Anatomography, https://lifesciencedb.jp/.

Figure: Navigation is helpful but we can become overreliant on it. News article from people.com.

Figure: The notion of artificial general intelligence is as absurd as the notion of an artificial general vehicle - no single vehicle is optimal for every journey. (Illustration by Dan Andrews inspired by a conversation about “The Atomic Human” Lawrence (2024))

Figure: The Atomic Eye, by slicing away aspects of the human that we used to believe to be unique to us, but are now the preserve of the machine, we learn something about what it means to be human.

Figure: This is the drawing Dan was inspired to create for Chapter 1. It captures the fundamentally narcissistic nature of our (societal) obsession with our intelligence.

Figure: The trinity of human, data, and computer, and highlights the modern phenomenon. The communication channel between computer and data now has an extremely high bandwidth. The channel between human and computer and the channel between data and human is narrow. New direction of information flow, information is reaching us mediated by the computer. The focus on classical statistics reflected the importance of the direct communication between human and data. The modern challenges of data science emerge when that relationship is being mediated by the machine.

Figure: The nature of digital communication has changed dramatically, with machines processing vast amounts of human-generated data and feeding it back to us in ways that can distort our information landscape. (Illustration by Dan Andrews inspired by Chapter 5 “Enlightenment” of “The Atomic Human” Lawrence (2024))

Figure: Consider the six-word novel, apocryphally credited to Ernest Hemingway, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. To understand what that means to a human, you need a great deal of additional context. Context that is not directly accessible to a machine that has not got both the evolved and contextual understanding of our own condition to realize both the implication of the advert and what that implication means emotionally to the previous owner.

Figure: Chicago Stone, side 2, recording sale of a number of fields, probably from Isin, Early Dynastic Period, c. 2600 BC, black basalt

Figure: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn suggests scientific paradigms are recorded in books.

Figure: William Blake’s Newton. 1795c-1805

Figure: Lunette containing Rehoboam and Abijah.

Figure: People communicate through artifacts and culture.

Figure: This is the drawing Dan was inspired to create for Chapter 4. It highlights how even if these machines can generate creative works the lack of origin in humans menas it is not the same as works of art that come to us through history.

.

Figure: A young sorcerer learns his masters spells, and deploys them to perform his chores, but can’t control the result.

Figure: The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper views liberal democracies as a collection of “piecemeal social engineers” who strive towards better outcomes.

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason.

Figure: The relationships between trust, autonomy and embodiment are key to understanding how to properly deploy AI systems in a way that avoids digital autocracy. (Illustration by Dan Andrews inspired by Chapter 3 “Intent” of “The Atomic Human” Lawrence (2024))

Figure: Bill Phillips and his MONIAC (completed in 1949). The machine is an analogue computer designed to simulate the workings of the UK economy.

Figure: The human analogue machine is the new interface that large language models have enabled the human to present. It has the capabilities of the computer in terms of communication, but it appears to present a “human face” to the user in terms of its ability to communicate on our terms. (Image quite obviously not drawn by generative AI!)

Figure: The trinity of human, data, and computer, and highlights the modern phenomenon. The communication channel between computer and data now has an extremely high bandwidth. The channel between human and computer and the channel between data and human is narrow. New direction of information flow, information is reaching us mediated by the computer. The focus on classical statistics reflected the importance of the direct communication between human and data. The modern challenges of data science emerge when that relationship is being mediated by the machine.

Figure: The HAM now sits between us and the traditional digital computer.


bits/min	$100 \times 10^{-9}$	$2,000$	$600 \times 10^9$

Figure: When we look at communication rates based on the information passing from one human to another across generations through their genetics, we see that computers watching us communicate is roughly equivalent to us watching organisms evolve. Estimates of germline mutation rates taken from Scally (2016).

Figure: Bandwidth vs Complexity.

Figure: This is the drawing Dan was inspired to create for Chapter 12. It captures the challenge the analogy where the speed of information assimilation associated with machines is related to the speed assimilation associated with humans.

Figure: Society faces many wicked problems in health, education, security, and social care that require carefully deploying AI toward meaningful societal challenges rather than focusing on commercially appealing applications. (Illustration by Dan Andrews inspired by the Epilogue of “The Atomic Human” Lawrence (2024))

\thanks

Lawrence, N.D., 2024. The atomic human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI. Allen Lane.

Scally, A., 2016. Mutation rates and the evolution of germline structure. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0137


bits/min	\(100 \times 10^{-9}\)	\(2,000\)	\(600 \times 10^9\)