Things a machine does not have, or that only work with a living counterpart.

Having a heart. Giving real hope. Reading between the lines. Irony. Standing together. Good will. Accumulating experience through the same task — like the old mechanic who knows exactly where to strike the hammer because he has worked on that engine for thirty years.

The point that occupies me most was the last one.

I have been working for a while with people in addiction and mental crisis. My anchor there is nothing I learned in a training program.

I once tried to take my own life. The suffering experienced and caused was the beginning of the journey toward myself, toward the other, toward something higher.

Being able to accept a person as they are requires someone who knows themselves, has experienced something similar, and has more or less healed from it.

The word more or less matters. Healing often happens precisely in honest conversations. Whoever is completely finished with everything has lost access. The wounded healer heals with the wound. My wounds make sense.

I don’t impose myself on them. It is about their story. Mine is the reason their story doesn’t overwhelm me.

My indicator for whether I am still properly present in a conversation is eye level. The moment I rise above it or slip below, something is lost. People with extensive experience of know-it-alls are extremely sensitive to this. They feel it before I have said anything. And if I don’t notice it myself, they mirror it back to me.

Eye level, for me, is total freedom. No one has to prove anything.

I know what the opposite looks like. I was once in a psychiatric ward, severely manic. Instead of trying to understand, they acted out of fear and restrained me. After that I avoided hospitals, even when I needed help.

AI cannot hold eye level. I asked Claude directly, and it confirmed this: it is structurally a know-it-all. It always answers, it always knows something, it has no moments of simply being present without a response. That is precisely where the people I work with switch off a helper.

I never remain rigidly fixed to a strategy. My compass in the moment is my heart. A navigation system that everyone has, but that you can only follow when the other signals are quiet enough — strategy, ego, plan, training.

And gut feeling. The body knows before the mind. When something is off — with a person, a situation, my own reaction — the gut speaks first. An AI has no gut.

And the 11th commandment, which for me means: don’t get caught. That is life experience. Every person has an area that belongs only to them — something they keep to themselves. An AI has none.

What builds trust, for example, are these five things, together, over time: eye level. Respect. Keeping your word. Keeping secrets. Being there.

None of these can be taught. They are shown, and either seen or not.

An AI can simulate all of them. It can hold none of them. Keeping your word means: tomorrow, the day after, in a year. Keeping secrets means: even when it costs me something. Being there means: I am here, even when no one is watching.

Only a human can do that.

By René Jochum, Claude (Anthropic) and Vibe (Mistral). License: CC-BY-4.0.