We've Been Thinking
About AI All Wrong

We’re living the oldest rerun: build something we fear but can’t live without.

 

The Oldest Fear 

The printing press opened the Bible to the masses while splintering spiritual authority and oversaturating the world with words. The television transformed living rooms into theaters, but also factories of distraction and passivity. The internet gave us a global village and with it a digital Babel. Now, it’s artificial intelligence: the digital mystery that drafts our emails, soothes our late-night panic attacks, matches us with strangers we hope will understand us.

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Half of Americans say they’re cautious about AI. Nearly as many express deeper concerns. Forty percent remain skeptical. Fifteen percent—the ones who sleep with the lights on—worry it might end the world. And yet we feed it daily: text generators, chatbots, face scanners. ChatGPT alone fields a billion prompts every day. One hundred twenty-two million users confessing their desires, anxieties, and private hopes. Training wheels for something growing up faster than Moore’s Law.

 

Timnit Gebru, former Google AI ethics lead and co-founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) has famously argued that the problem isn’t that AI is getting smarter. It’s that they’re becoming too much like us: biased and ethically inconsistent. Flawed in ways that should disqualify anyone from unchecked power. This is a serious problem, but only a symptom of a more profound issue. But what if the real crisis isn’t how AI mimics us but how we've already become mimics ourselves?

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The Real Heresy

The real heresy is this: the danger isn’t that AI will become too much like us. It’s that we have already become too much like it.

 

We don’t wrestle with thoughts anymore; we generate content. We don’t cultivate relationships; we manage them like transactions. Mental health and personal fulfillment feel increasingly depersonalized. Consultations with AI systems designed for speed, not soul. Even prayer feels like submitting a ticket to tech support. No assurance that anyone is listening. And the best advice we have left is to try turning ourselves off and on again.

 

What we don’t ask, what we’re too afraid to ask, is this: Why does this feel so familiar? This isn’t science fiction. It’s the liturgy of contemporary life. The liturgy of mechanization, of depersonalization.

 

For decades, we have trained ourselves to think like machines. Become efficient. Scalable. A monetizable influencer. We upload our personalities, outsource our thinking, and delegate our creativity. And now, when we stare into the 6.1-inch screen, the eyes staring back look dim. Unlike the human soul, invisibly shaped through patient formation, the machine is built for speed. Hurry withers the soul. In our rush to optimize, we risk becoming people who no longer linger, love, or listen.

 

Not Even Some Good?

Of course, AI has done great good. Early cancer detection is a magnificent example. But the deeper question isn’t what AI can solve, it’s what kinds of problems it teaches us to care about. In science, the shift is easy to miss behind progress. Computational models focus us on simulation, even when reality resists. Genomic sequencing tempts us to decode life as if it were code. Machine learning teaches us to prize prediction over explanation. 

 

Quietly, we forget what knowledge is for. Wisdom, slow, difficult, and inseparable from character, becomes almost unintelligible. The irony is sharp: the faster we gather information, the less prepared we are to bear its weight or live with its questions. Wisdom asks what is worth knowing and what kind of life knowledge should serve. And we are perishing for lack of both.

 

This is where discernment must begin, not by asking what technology can do, but what it’s doing to us. Before we decide what tools to trust with our lives, we must first decide what kind of life we want to live.

 

To Be Human in an AI Age

If there’s any hope, it lies not in halting innovation but in recovering an older, deeper way of being. One stubborn enough to resist the machinery we keep building, and free enough to remember what AI cannot touch.

 

The uncomfortable truth is this: much of what we cherish—belonging, love, significance—is endangered by the conveniences we cradle in our pockets and homes. We feel it already. We sense it when meaningful conversation thin after an hour of scrolling. 

 

But there is another way: steady, deliberate, subversive. A way that returns to reality. The slow and quiet formation of the soul. To resist what hollows us out, we don’t need better technologies. We need better loves. And that requires better discernment. To that, I offer four provocations.

 

Discern What Is Lost, Not Just Gained

Every technology gives, but every technology also takes. This isn’t prophecy; it’s precedent. The car gave us mobility but hollowed out cities. Google Maps gets us there, but it rushes us past the hidden gems of our neighborhood. Video meetings ended commutes but eroded the grace of human encounters.

 

AI promises ease, optimization, and a mind unburdened by flesh. Generative AI offers writing without grit, companionship without vulnerability. Imagine a library where the books, night after night, gut themselves. Paragraphs collapse into bullet points. Uncomfortable ideas vanish. Arguments stripped to slogans. Poetry disappears. Soon, they no longer demand reading at all. They gaze. Scroll. Forget. It’s not just books that become empty. It’s us. Minds forgetting how to wrestle. Hearts forgetting how to wonder. Souls, forgetting how to flourish. And do we even remember that souls are real?

 

Do we even notice what’s gone missing? Or have we trained ourselves not to grieve? What do we lose? Vulnerability. Humility. Understanding. The more we let AI generate our thoughts, our feelings, our creativity, the less tethered we are to what made us persons in the first place. We’re obsessed with what AI will automate. We talk less about what it will amputate.

 

Understand You Are Being Formed

The question isn’t whether we’re being shaped, it’s what shape we’re being pressed into. What loves we are being trained to desire, and whether those loves lead to life or to hollow fatigue.

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Technologies are not neutral. They are sculptors. Instagram molds us toward vanity and comparison. News feeds harden us into outrage. AI assistants incline us toward passivity. The erosion is gradual, but the consequences are cumulative. 

 

Every technology teaches a way of knowing. TikTok teaches knowledge by spectacle. Google by information dump. X (formerly Twitter) by clever brevity or bombast. AI teaches knowing by disengaged outsourcing. A machine might predict your preferences, but it will not teach you wisdom. Wisdom requires friction, deliberation, even failure—all the things AI is designed to eliminate. 

 

Efficiency Is Not a Virtue

Everyone has a gospel. The gospel of the tech industry is efficiency: the art of doing more with less. Less time. Less thought. Less soul. But what if faster isn’t always better? What if faster and cheaper erode the capacities that make us fully alive? A well-oiled machine is still a machine.

 

One of the clearest signs we’re becoming machine-like is our urge to make even love more efficient. Enter the intimacy economy, where affection, attention, and companionship are sold. Replika: learns to love you as you talk to yourself. EVA AI: always says the right thing. 

 

AI therapy bots, designed to offer “empathy” at scale, tokenize your confession and return a calibrated response. But can it hold silence when words fail? The difference is between sitting with someone while they cry and watching a frozen face on a Zoom call. One is presence. The other is latency. 

 

Forgiveness doesn’t arrive on command. Healing doesn’t follow our account preferences. Do we really want to move from “Trust the process” to “Trust the processor”?

 

But is there another way to live? One that remembers we are not machines, but miracles, souls dipped in dust?

 

Recover a Vision of What We Are For

Every technology carries a vision of the good life: frictionless convenience, maximum control, limitless choice. But we know that DoorDash feeds isolation. Netflix, seclusion. Remote work, disconnection. We know this like we know the mindfulness app won't make us mindful, but we keep it pinging. Like we know our screen time report is a confession, but we scroll past it faster every week. Why? Because being human—slow, loud, unfinished—now feels heavier than being alone. And who needs a soul when you’ve got same-day delivery?

 

But what if the good life honors human limits, embraces vulnerability, and prizes community over competition? Without such a vision, we are powerless against the inertia of our habits, slowly shaped not by what we intend, but by a future dominated by market logic rather than human flourishing. Who is more compelling: the overleveraged executive with an army of digital assistants, or the person who wakes without reaching for their phone, who knows their heart because they’ve learned to listen to it in solitude without self-contempt?

 

You already know this. Or at least, some stubborn part of you aches for it. You’ve felt the hollow fatigue after another night of endless scrolling. You’ve seen the outrage, the emptiness, the constant performance. You’ve watched your attention fray, your spirit thin. You’ve longed, maybe quietly, maybe desperately, for something slower, something harder, something real.

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A Counter-Liturgy

Now is the time to practice a counter-liturgy. End the day by disrupting the cycle. Turn it all off. Ask yourself: Where was I drawn toward life today? Where did I trade it for hollow efficiency? What loves are being formed in me? Not to shame yourself, but to remember that to be human is to love, to serve, to live for more than the next notification. This is a quiet rebellion, not against technology, but against what it makes of us if we sleep standing up.

 

We can’t halt the rise of AI. Nor should we. But we can refuse to let it claim what matters most: the soul’s freedom, the heart’s loves, the mind’s capacity for wonder. We can live, not as machines, but as people, fiercely, patiently, joyfully, for the greater glory of something we cannot automate.

 

In the end, it will be those who refuse to be optimized who show the world what it means to live.