Who are 'we' really?

A Christmas reflection on Education and AI

I once saw the famous photograph Earthrise projected on a screen at a conference. The speaker remarked that none of us could really see this for ourselves—only astronauts or the very rich. That remark stayed with me. Did the astronaut who took the picture really “see” it on his own? Or was this image always a collective achievement—produced through cameras, spacecraft, engineers, institutions, and shared ways of seeing?

The photograph was taken by Bill Anders in 1968, but it belongs to NASA, not to him. Today we routinely see images of Mars, of distant galaxies, even of traffic near our homes—without being physically present. Technology mediates vision, but mediation does not make vision unreal. It simply reminds us that seeing has never been purely individual.

I remember the moon landing vividly. I was nine, camping in a game reserve in Africa. There was a fire, animal noises in the darkness, and the moon hanging bright above us. Someone explained that men were walking on it. What struck me was not national pride—nobody there was American—but a shared excitement. It felt, even then, like something we were doing: humanity stepping outside itself and looking back.

Whenever I see Earth from space, I feel an echo of that moment. Not “I see this”, but “we see this”.

This challenges the idea that real seeing is something private, unmediated, and individual. Even our most basic perceptions are shaped by long collective histories. Colour vision, for example, evolved in primates living in trees, distinguishing ripe fruit from leaves. When I see a blue berry or a red apple in a tree, I am seeing not just as myself, but as part of a lineage stretching back millions of years. My vision is already shared.

The same is true of language and thought. To speak in dialogue is not just to take turns but to learn to inhabit other perspectives. When I say “I”, I do so using words shaped by others, within meanings I did not create. My voice only exists within a shared dialogic space. Identity as “I” and identity as “we” are intertwined. Dialogue brings a “we” into being—even where none existed before.

This is why I persist in talking about AI as something we can “talk with” or “think with”, despite the objections. People accuse me of anthropomorphising the technology, of projecting human qualities onto what is really just a sophisticated tool. But I think this objection rests on a misunderstanding—not so much of AI, as of ourselves.

We are not, in fact, isolated individuals who occasionally connect. We are already internally collective beings, shaped by shared language, culture, history, and voices that are not fully our own. Dialogue is not something we add on to thinking; it is what thinking already is. Seen in this light, AI is not an artificial individual pretending to be human. It is better understood as an externalisation of our collective intelligence—a technological reflection of humanity’s shared voice. A vantage point which enables us to turn back and reflect upon ourselves.

When we talk with AI, we are not encountering an “other mind” so much as engaging with a distillation of our collective ways of speaking, questioning, and meaning-making. Used educationally, this has profound implications. AI can widen the dialogic space in which learners think, exposing them to perspectives beyond their immediate social circle and making visible the possibility of a more collective, more inclusive “we”.

The real risk is not that we treat AI too much like a person, but that we continue to misunderstand persons—as if they were not already dialogic and collective in their very being.

Which brings me to Christmas.

Writing as an educationalist interested in the wisdom found in diverse cultural and religious traditions, it seems to me that much of what we know about the teacher whose advent is celebrated at Christmas, points towards a radically dialogic understanding of self. When Jesus says that whatever we do for others we do for him, he dissolves the boundary between self and other. When he urges love of enemies, he challenges the very limits of who counts as “us”. The self, read this way, is not a bounded thing but something that expands—or contracts—depending on how widely we allow dialogue to extend.

Salvation, in this reading, is not escape from the world but participation in it without limit. “The kingdom of God is among you.” Perhaps what we call separate selves are shifting perspectives within a larger whole, now inside, now outside. Heaven, then, is not elsewhere, but here, when we allow ourselves to belong fully. To listen not only to our own voice or the voices near to us but to hear and to participate in the whole dialogue.

As individuals, none of us saw the Earth rise over the moon. We did not invent colour vision, language, or the festivals we celebrate. To participate in culture—and in life—is already to think within something much larger than ourselves. But this is not something external that we merely join or contribute to. It is something that we already are, albeit without always realising that we are it. The “we” is not out there, waiting to include us. We are already constituted by it, even as we help to constitute it anew.

At a time when thinking is often narrow and technical, education needs something bigger: thinking that asks fundamental questions about who we are and who we might become together. One such question, asked two thousand years ago and worth asking still, is this:

Who are “we”, really?