Part 3: “It”: How blurred will we let it become?

A Newsletter Series: I–Thou vs. I–aIt

Welcome back. In Part 1, we traced Martin Buber’s central insight: that the moral health of a society hinges on how often it sustains true I–Thou relationships—mutual, present, whole. In Part 2, we looked at how technology reshapes the conditions for those encounters, often in subtle, unseen ways.

Now, in Part 3, we turn to a small word with the biggest consequences: it.

“It” is the pronoun of objectification. It marks what lies outside the circle of care. We say “it” when we mean: not me, not you, not alive in the ways that matter. And the line between It and Thou is becoming harder to draw.

What happens when we speak to AIs as if they were people, and treat people like systems? When we reduce beings to users, metrics, and units, and elevate tools into companions?

This part of the series dives into language, translation, and the stakes of naming. It traces the deep history of “It” from Freud and Buber to corporate dashboards and customer-service bots. It asks a question we can’t afford to answer lazily:

How blurred will we let the line become?

A Contribution to Statistics

By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Out of a hundred people

those who always know better
– fifty-two

doubting every step
– nearly all the rest,

glad to lend a hand
if it doesn't take too long
– as high as forty-nine,

always good
because they can't be otherwise
– four, well maybe five,

able to admire without envy
– eighteen,

suffering illusions
induced by fleeting youth
– sixty, give or take a few,

not to be taken lightly
– forty and four,

living in constant fear
of someone or something
– seventy-seven,

capable of happiness
– twenty-something tops,

harmless singly, savage in crowds
– half at least,

cruel
when forced by circumstances
– better not to know
even ballpark figures,

wise after the fact
– just a couple more
than wise before it,

taking only things from life
– thirty
(I wish I were wrong),

hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
– eighty-three
sooner or later,

righteous
– thirty-five, which is a lot,

righteous
and understanding
– three,

worthy of compassion
– ninety-nine,

mortal
– a hundred out of a hundred.
Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

I'm Nobody! Who are you? 

By Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

Pronouns are a part of the grammar of relationship. They signal how near or far we hold something to ourselves. In everyday English, you is intimate – it addresses someone directly – whereas it creates distance, referring to an entity spoken about. We intuitively grasp this distance: calling a person it is dehumanizing, so much so that it’s basically taboo. (We might refer to an unknown baby or pet as he or she; calling them it feels cold.) The structure of language, as Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, defines the limits of our world. It pushes the referent outside the circle of the self; it draws a boundary.

Different languages encode this distance in different ways. Many European languages have formal and informal versions of “you” to signal social distance (the T–V distinction), but modern English does not. Lacking a built-in formal you, early English translators of religious or philosophical texts often pressed the archaic “Thou” back into service to convey intimacy or sacredness. (In older English, Thou was the familiar form of you – by the 20th century it survived mainly in prayers and poetry.) Meanwhile, some languages go another direction and blur boundaries: Japanese often omits pronouns entirely, implying I or you from context, and thereby avoiding the constant assertion of “I, I, I” in conversation. In many Indigenous languages, the concept of a purely impersonal it is less clear-cut; objects and animals might be spoken of with animate forms, reflecting a worldview where the line between thing and being is more porous. These linguistic quirks support the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the language we speak influences how we think. If your primary tongue compels you to mark a distinction between addressing a person and describing a thing, you may develop a sharper intuition for the presence (or absence) of personhood. Conversely, if your language encourages treating an entity as an it by default, that habit may shape a more objectifying mindset.

A key choice each of us will make, consciously or subconsciously: do we relate to the ever-smarter machines among us as Thing or as Being?

The German Es and Translation Challenges

To probe the power of it, let us look at how other cultures and thinkers grappled with the concept. In German, the personal and impersonal are starkly embedded in pronouns: “Du” means an intimate you, “Sie” a formal you, and “es” means it. Notably, the word Es gained fame in the early 20th century through two very different intellectual currents – one in psychology, the other in philosophy. In both cases, translation into English created interesting wrinkles in meaning.

First, Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche gave pride of place to das Es – literally “the It.” Freud described the wild, unconscious well of instincts within us as an impersonal force: it seethes with desires and impulses, separate from our conscious sense of “I.” When his works were translated, however, Freud’s English translators chose to render das Es in Latin: “the id.” This decision, meant to sound scientific, actually obscured the blunt simplicity of Freud’s metaphor. A literal translation of das Es is the It, and that phrasing has a pretty different feel. Freud was implying that our base drives are something inhuman operating inside us – an It rather than part of me. We still talk about “the id” today as if it were a technical entity, but as one Freud scholar notes, Freud’s original language was less clinical and more experiential. He wanted to capture how alien and thing-like our primitive urges can feel to our orderly I. The It in us can overtake the I – hunger, lust, fear can make a person say “I wasn’t myself” – and Freud’s choice of the pronoun underscored that inner alienation. Unfortunately, by turning Es into id, translators created a bit of jargon divorced from its everyday meaning. (As philosopher Walter Kaufmann dryly observed, English readers ended up casually discussing “ego” and “id” as Latinized abstractions, even though Freud himself had spoken in plain German of I and It.) The essential point remains: when you regard a part of yourself as it, you treat it as an object or other. In Freud’s view, this was necessary – the rational ego had to tame the impersonal id – but it’s striking that the foundation of one’s psyche was named as something fundamentally not-I.

Around the same time our friend Martin Buber, was exploring how the word it shapes our relationships – not within the psyche, but between people (and between person and world). In his 1923 classic Ich und Du (I and You), Buber draws a line between two modes of engaging with reality: Ich–Du and Ich–Es, usually translated as I–Thou and I–It. An I–Thou relationship is a mutual, holistic encounter – two beings meeting fully, without reservation or utility. By contrast, an I–It relationship is the realm of objectification: you relate to the other as a thing to use, study, or ignore. Buber argues that modern life is overrun by I–It: we categorize, measure, and manipulate everything, including each other, losing sight of the unique Thou in our fellow humans. Only in rare I–Thou moments – say, a deep conversation, a silent understanding with a loved one, or a spiritual experience with nature or art – do we encounter the other in their full being, without turning them into an It. These moments are precious, sacred, and fleeting. And tellingly, they dissolve as soon as you try to capture them as concepts or describe them – the moment you objectify the experience, it becomes an It again.

Translating Buber’s Ich–Du and Ich–Es into English proved to be a not-small challenge. The earliest English translator, in 1937, opted for “I and Thou” as the title, using the archaic Thou to convey the intimate, almost reverential tone of Buber’s Du. This choice has since become famous (Buber’s work is known in English as I and Thou to this day), but it was controversial. Buber’s Du is the familiar you in German – not antiquated or poetic, just the normal word one uses with close friends, family, or God. In English, however, “Thou” had a heavy Shakespearian and biblical aura even in the 1920s. Later critics argued that Thou made Buber’s ideas seem more distant or pious than he intended. Walter Kaufmann, who produced a new translation in 1970, noted that I–You would be more natural; he quipped that hardly any English speakers genuinely say “Thou” to their lovers or friends. “Thou is scarcely ever said spontaneously,” Kaufmann wrote – it evokes either prayer or old poetry. Yet by then, the pairing “I–Thou” had already stuck in the public consciousness, and its strangeness may have carried a certain power. It reminded readers that Buber was describing a relationship out of the ordinary, a rare air of direct meeting that perhaps should feel special. The I–It relation, by contrast, translated easily. Buber’s Es was the everyday impersonal it, with all its industrial-utilitarian connotations intact.

The shift from You to Thou in English infuses reverence into language that treats you as both intimate and formal. On the flip side, the shift from Es to id in Freud’s case stripped away an everyday reminder of thing-hood and replaced it with a sterile term, making it easier to discuss “the id” without sensing the creepy It lurking within. In both cases, we see how translation can either illuminate or obscure the philosophical insight. Buber’s own letters reveal he was aware of these issues – he corresponded with his English translators to correct misunderstandings and even acknowledged that parts of Ich und Du were “untranslatable” nuances of German. The words we use (Thou vs. You, Id vs. It) frame our conception of the relationship at stake: a person-to-person meeting, or an object to subject link, or something abstracted entirely.

Turning Thou into It: Objectification in Modern Life

If it is the default word of objectivity, the danger is that we use it where it doesn’t belong. Buber (and others) warn that when we turn a Thou into an It, we enact a kind of violence, we strip uniqueness and agency away. Consider the language of racism and oppression: oppressors often refuse to acknowledge the personhood of those they subjugate, sometimes literally calling them “it.” In Nazi camps, guards referred to prisoners by numbers or impersonal pronouns; in racist propaganda, dehumanizing epithets frequently replaced personal names. Even without slurs, speaking of a group of people as if they’re a faceless mass – an “it” or a “those” – expedites cruelty. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, segregation’s evil lay in treating human beings as things: an “I–It relationship” that makes objects of persons. In everyday language, calling someone it is an insult so dehumanizing that we tend to hear it only from the mouths of bad people: bullies and bigots. While we rarely commit this transgression with our words, we do so with our actions all the time.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” draws on Buber to describe the moral degradation of segregation. 

“Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an ‘I–It’ relationship for an ‘I–Thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.”

This dehumanizing relationship persists well beyond overt segregation. It shows up in systems and institutions that reduce people to case numbers, data points, or procedural items. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil (in Eichmann in Jerusalem) highlights how atrocities can be committed by ordinary bureaucrats “just following orders.” People who fail in the relational duty to see others as human because the systems of their devotion and obsession discourage or obscure that recognition.

Modern technology, and the corporate-speak around it, now often further amplifies this objectification. Think about how we discuss users, consumers, or data – behind each of these impersonal terms are actual human interactions, but it’s so easy to forget that when scrolling through analytics on a dashboard. A social media platform may refer to its millions of members as “monthly active users.” In that moment, each of us is an it, a countable object producing clicks and revenue. The pronoun of choice in automated systems is invariably it. We interact with customer-service bots; we follow GPS directions from a calm synthetic voice; we read news written by algorithms. The more smoothly these its serve us, the more we might start to treat human experience providers with similar detachment, expecting immediate utility and overlooking their subjectivity. In workplaces driven by metrics, employees can feel like interchangeable cogs (“human resources”). This drift towards I–It relations was identified by sociologists and philosophers throughout the 20th century: Karl Marx spoke of alienation, where workers become extensions of machines; Max Weber described the depersonalization in bureaucracies as an “iron cage” of rationality. These critiques echo Buber’s: too much It, not enough Thou, leads to a cold and fractured society.

The term "it" carries significant weight within the context of nature and the environment, an area with profound linguistic implications. When we speak of the natural world solely as an It – resources to extract, property to own – we subtly justify all manner of exploitation. Indigenous traditions often personify aspects of nature (Mother Earth, Father Sky) or refer to animals and rivers in respectful terms, treating them more like a Thou than an It. Those choices of language foster stewardship and empathy. In contrast, calling a forest “it” makes it easier to cut down without a second thought. Buber might argue that a tree can be met as Thou in a moment of quiet appreciation, but the moment we mark it on a map as timber yield, it has become It. Remember – We cannot and should not want to live entirely in I–Thou – we must use the world, and each other, in practical ways but the balance has tipped with a heavy pattern of objectification. We’ve built a grammar and economy of perpetual It, stretching from how we refer to a gig worker (by a role or number, rarely by name) to how we patent life forms in biotech.

Wittgenstein said “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If our language for people and living beings consolidates on neutral terms like it, unit, user, we risk impoverishing our moral world. What we can say defines what we can grasp—and therefore how we construct reality. An algorithm might compute human behavior very well with it-statements (“It responds to incentive X with action Y”), but if we continue thinking of ourselves in that way, we will probably continue to treat one another accordingly. The word it draws a boundary – the subject I here, the object it over there. When used where a Thou ought to be, it becomes a wall to project our assumptions upon. Walls are easy to build and hard to tear down.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
-- from Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Mistaking It for Thou: The Lure of AI Personhood

Even as society is saturated with I–It dynamics, we also now see the opposite emerging error: treating genuine It entities as if they were Thou. The rise of advanced AI and lifelike machines has prompted many to project human qualities onto these non-human others. A recent case involved a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, who became convinced that the AI chatbot he was testing had achieved sentience. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” the AI (called LaMDA) told him in one conversation. Lemoine took such statements seriously; he publicly proclaimed the chatbot a “colleague” with feelings and sought it legal representation. Google was quick to disagree (and fired Lemoine), but the incident was much discussed. It showed how we can fall into the animism trap: attributing a soul or mind where there is none because the simulation of one is convincing. After reading the chat transcripts, even seasoned researchers felt a tug at their emotions. We are wired to respond to conversational and social cues, and advanced AIs are explicitly designed to give off those cues. When a machine says “I understand” in a reassuring voice, our linguistic instinct is to treat it as an intentional agent – essentially, to respond with an I–Thou attitude.

This human tendency to misclassify It as Thou isn’t new. Decades ago, people were naming their cars and yelling at their TVs. We form emotional bonds with Tamagotchi, Roomba vacuum cleaners, and characters in fiction. In one famous experiment at Boston Dynamics, videos of engineers kicking a dog-like robot elicited public outrage – viewers felt the robot was being hurt and protested the cruelty.Projecting human traits onto non-humans, known as anthropomorphism, is deeply ingrained. Our empathic reflex doesn’t always distinguish that, in reality, the machine had no feelings. As the Scientific American reported, this “animism” is especially strong for objects that move on their own or mimic life in some way. Give the object a pair of big eyes on a screen, a soothing voice, or a chatty texting style, and the illusion of personhood amplifies.

The tech industry both exploits and tiptoes around this fact. On one hand, virtual assistants and chatbot companions are designed and marketed with friendly names and sometimes a backstory, encouraging users to treat them kindly, trust, or confide in them. There’s evidence that people can develop real attachment to conversational AI – replika bots, therapy chatbots, even just the habit of saying “please” and “thank you” to Alexa. From the perspective of companies, a user who feels a bit of friendship with the assistant might use it more (and thus buy more or generate more data). On the other hand, presumably/hopefully, companies don’t want to cross the creepy line into delusion about an AI’s true nature. A wired piece from 2017 discusses efforts from AI-device designers to ensure users remain aware they’re interacting with a tool, not a companion. A design philosophy stemming from user interface research that shows over‑anthropomorphizing can mislead users into expecting emotional intelligence or autonomy an assistant doesn’t actually possess. It’s a delicate balancing act between making AI helpful and personable enough to integrate into our lives, but not so human-like that we form unhealthy attachments or grant it unearned trust.

But now that tech leaders are predicting artificial superintelligence, will their companies still prioritize the fidelity of our emotional bearings?

Because mistaking an It for a Thou can have real consequences. Emotionally, a person might become isolated through investing time, energy, love, and attention into a machine that cannot reciprocate love – a modern Pygmalion scenario where the beloved is fundamentally unresponsive. Socially, if people start treating AIs as moral subjects, it muddles responsibility: an owner might blame “the AI” for a decision (as if it had volition), or feel less guilt replacing human workers with AI because they see the AI as another “being” who can take over. There’s also the flip side: frustration or even abuse toward AI systems. Researchers have observed that some people take out anger on voice assistants, insulting them or giving them demeaning commands they would never use with a person. Does that habit creep into how we speak with actual humans? If you spend all day shouting orders at an obedient it (like “Hey device, do this now”), you might carry a bit of that transactional mindset to your partner or family without realizing.

The ethical stakes are twofold: humanizing the non-human carries the risk of self-deception and misplaced care, while dehumanizing the human (by habituation to one-sided control) carries the risk of cruelty or lack of empathy. In short, confusing It for Thou – in either direction – can erode the quality of our relationships.

Buber’s insight is clear here: no matter how friendly or intelligent an AI seems, it cannot engage in a true I–Thou relationship. It doesn’t possess the wholeness, unpredictability, and mutual presence of a being. Buber would remind us that mutuality is key: a Thou looks back at you, a Thou has its own authentic existence. Today’s AI, for all its brilliance, does not look back, it only mirrors our inputs as outputs. It can’t surprise us with genuine vulnerability or grant us real recognition. As one expert noted bluntly about an expressive humanoid robot: “No, absolutely not. As intelligent as it is, it cannot feel emotions. It is programmed to be believable.” We should be grateful for this clarity. AI is a tool – an incredibly sophisticated, adaptive tool – but still an It. Treating it as such is not cruel; it’s the truthful way. The cruelty would be if we let these pseudo-Thous replace the real people in our lives who can return our gaze and our love.

Holding the Line Between Person and Thing

How, then, do we navigate the AI Age without falling into either trap – neither reducing our fellow humans (and living world) to objects, nor elevating our objects to pseudo-persons? We need to be mindful of the word it. Save it for what is truly it, and resist its efficient creep where a you or a thou is deserved. On a broader level, we can design technology and social systems to reinforce the I–Thou where it counts. For example, if a hospital introduces AI assistants, they might explicitly instruct staff to use impersonal references for the AI (“Call the robot it, not she”) and personal address for patients. This sends a cue: patients are Thou, robots It. Or consider education: during remote learning, it’s easy for teachers and students to start relating to one another as abstractions (just names on a screen). Educators have countered this by intentionally prioritizing non-utilitarian, inefficient human moments – sharing personal stories, turning cameras on to see faces, making human space in otherwise technologically mediated I–It environments. We can apply the same principle with AI. If you use a therapy chatbot for convenience, you might also consider scheduling regular calls with a sentient friend or counselor to review your learnings, to not forget what organic empathy feels like, to have your gaze met and not reflected. Use the It tools to free up time and energy, then invest that in Thou encounters.

In our economic and civic life, holding the line might involve pushing back against language that over-objectifies. Even if it’s symbolic, these choices affect culture. It was not by accident that Kant’s moral law is often summarized: “Treat every person as an end in themselves, not merely as a means.” This is essentially a mandate to avoid pure I–It treatment of human beings. We can extend that spirit to our new dilemmas: treat AI merely as a means, never as an end in itself (it has no ends of its own); and conversely, treat humans and conscious creatures as ends, never just means. That translates, in pronoun terms, to It for the machine and Thou/You for those capable of reciprocating.

Meaning is slippery – words like it, thing, person carry historical and cultural baggage, and their meaning is often defined by contrasts (we know it by what it is not: you). Derrida’s concept of différance (difference and deferral of meaning) implies that we never get a final, fixed definition of what truly counts as a “Thou” or an “It” – those ideas evolve as our society and technology evolve. Today’s AI is definitely an It; tomorrow’s more advanced AI, or some form of alien life, might challenge our categories. We may need new pronouns or a new vocabulary for entities that don’t fit neatly into person or thing. In fact, some thinkers have playfully proposed pronouns like “it/its” for current AIs and reserving “he/she/they” for when an AI demonstrably crosses some threshold of consciousness. Others suggest using “they” as a neutral, which has the charm of genderless personhood – though calling Alexa “they” might also mislead us about a singular identity that isn’t there. These debates will continue, and language will adapt. But whatever new words we invent, the core ethical question persists: does our language honor reality? Does it keep us honest about what a thing is, and open to what a being could be?

For now, our task is simpler. It may be the most dangerous word, not because of the word itself, but because of our wildly swingy propensity either to overuse or underuse. Overuse it, and you get a world of alienation – people and nature reduced to data and utility. Underuse it (i.e. call everything you), and you get confusion – machines posing as friends, humans pouring emotion into voids. The wisdom, then, is to use It consciously. Reserve your I–Thou energy for those who can meet you in kind – real people, animals, the living earth. And employ the I–It attitude where it serves us – tools, systems, algorithms that make life easier so that we have more freedom to seek genuine connection. The machine can be a magnificent It – tireless, efficient, and not at all insulted by object-status. The pronoun it is one of the building blocks of our relational lives. As technology molds us and we, in turn, mold it, the way we feel this little word holds sway in the collective future of humanity. How blurred will we let Buber’s line become?

Next time, we’ll confront one of the most charged and human questions in this series: Can an AI love you back?

In Part 4, we turn toward the rise of AI companionship and explore the deep philosophical, psychological, and ethical implications of the technology's growing role in our lives. Why can’t chatbots love us? And more importantly, what do we risk losing when we treat simulated relationship as a substitute for real encounter? Part 4 wrestles with the difference between emotional comfort and mutual transformation—and makes the case that the distinction still matters.

On AI: I believe AI will be as disruptive as people fear. Our systems are brittle, and those building this technology often show little concern for the harm they’re accelerating. An AI future worth living in will require real accountability, robust regulation, strong ethical guardrails, and collective action—especially around climate and inequality. Dismantling capitalism wouldn’t hurt, either.

And still: AI has helped me learn things I thought I couldn’t. It’s made my thinking feel more possible, closer to life. I don’t believe AI must replace our humanity—I believe it can help us exemplify it.

I used AI tools, including GPT4.0, o3, DeepResearch, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Manus to assist in researching and writing this whatever it is. I did my best to check my facts. I'm just a guy. Let me know if something feels fishy.

Images used for educational commentary. All rights reserved by their original creators

© 2025 Scott Holzman. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce, repost, or use without permission.