In The sane society, written in 1968, robotization was for Erich Fromm primarily not a question of machines replacing humans. Rather, he saw the problem in human beings becoming machinelike in their everyday lives. In a recent debate on whether we have outsourced our thinking to technology too much, the leader of University of Oulu’s research program "Hybrid intelligence" articulated the present situation of humanity by saying that AI will not replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI. Paying attention to unique human capabilities (such as “empathy”) Järvelä and her colleagues (2023), envision a good future in relation to human-AI collaboration, creating efficient teaching and learning, that would eventually lead to more just world and more equally distributed possibilities.

In such human-AI collaboration it is important to pay attention to the way in which “unique human capabilities” are articulated. I begin with a description of robotization as described by Fromm in The Sane Society and in The revolution of Hope, proceeding to his articulation of what is specifically human, and how it relates to possibilities that technology had brought about in the 1960’s. Further, I describe hope in Fromm’s vocabulary as a particular kind of experience. As other experiences, also hope is for Fromm something that is difficult to put into words. He suggests that poetry, music and other forms of art are “by far the best-suited media for describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for adequate representations of human experience” (Fromm, 1968, p. 13). Following this Idea, I describe a Finnish folksong that ends up in desperation, into a hopeless situation. Scrutinizing the textual and other moments of the song, I finally conclude in articulating the hope as joint and conscious experience of hopelessness.