WHO DO WE BECOME IN THE AGE OF AI? Field Reading — Week 36
We have entered the Age of AI, and one of the strangest things about living through a genuine historical transition is that we rarely recognize its full significance while we are standing inside it. Life continues. We make coffee, answer messages, take our children to school, go to work, worry about money, fall in love, grieve, create, argue and make plans for next summer, while underneath the ordinary rhythm of our lives something profound is changing. Artificial intelligence is moving into our workplaces, our schools, our art, our healthcare, our communication and increasingly into the small decisions of everyday life, and suddenly humanity finds itself confronted with a technology powerful enough to make us ask questions that are not really technological questions at all. They are questions about us.
Everywhere I turn, I hear fear around AI. People ask whether it will take our jobs, make us less intelligent, replace human creativity, manipulate elections, transform warfare, control information or eventually become so powerful that humanity loses control of what it has created. Some of these concerns deserve to be taken very seriously. I do not believe wisdom means dismissing the risks simply because we are fascinated by the possibilities. But I have also noticed something in myself: the more I work with AI, the less interested I become in the simple question of whether AI is good or bad. Instead, another question keeps appearing.
What if AI is not primarily our enemy? What if AI is one of the most honest mirrors humanity has ever created?
Because the most revealing thing about a powerful technology is not what the technology can do, but what human beings decide to do with it.
We have stood here before
This is not the first time humanity has discovered a force powerful enough to change civilization. Again and again, we have reached moments where knowledge has placed extraordinary new capacities in our hands, and every time this happens, the technology itself becomes entangled with the consciousness, values, fears, ambitions and wounds of the people holding it.
The atom is perhaps one of the clearest examples. In 1938, nuclear fission was discovered, revealing something almost unimaginable hidden within ordinary matter: enormous amounts of energy could be released from the nucleus of an atom. Within only a few years, while the world was consumed by the Second World War, that scientific discovery became part of the Manhattan Project. The first nuclear weapon was detonated in July 1945, and only weeks later atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is something deeply sobering about that history. Human beings reached into the architecture of matter itself and discovered an extraordinary source of power, and one of our first great applications of that knowledge was to create a weapon capable of destroying a city. But nuclear physics did not choose Hiroshima.
The atom did not wake up one morning and decide what humanity should do with the power contained within it. The same understanding of nuclear processes would also contribute to energy production, scientific research, medical imaging, cancer treatment and technologies that have saved and improved human lives. The knowledge opened a door; what walked through that door depended upon us.
This is why our history with technology matters so much now, because the pattern repeats itself in different forms.
Fire is one of humanity’s oldest technologies, and perhaps still one of the most beautiful examples. Fire allowed our ancestors to survive cold nights, cook food, gather together, create light in darkness and eventually transform materials and build civilizations. Yet the same fire that warms a child can burn down a home. There is nothing contradictory about the fire itself. What changes is the intention, circumstance and human being standing beside it.
The aircraft tells a similar story. The ancient human dream of leaving the ground eventually became reality, and suddenly distances that had separated families, cultures and continents for centuries could be crossed within hours. Aircraft carry people home. They transport medicine, food and emergency assistance. They allow us to encounter places and people our ancestors could barely have imagined reaching. Yet almost as soon as humanity learned to fly, we also learned how to weaponize flight, and the sky became another place from which human beings could kill one another.
Chemistry has transformed human life in ways so extensive that we barely notice them anymore. It has given us medicines, materials, fertilizers, sanitation systems and countless processes that support modern civilization, while the same human understanding of chemical reactions has also been turned toward poison gas and chemical warfare. Biotechnology now gives us extraordinary possibilities for diagnosing disease, developing treatments, understanding genetics and perhaps correcting conditions that previous generations could only endure, while simultaneously confronting us with uncomfortable questions about biological weapons, genetic manipulation, ownership of life and how much power any human institution should possess over the biological foundations of another human being.
None of these examples mean that technology is neutral in every sense, or that we can simply separate the tool from the systems that create it. Technologies are shaped by governments, corporations, economies, cultures and power structures, and once they exist they can reshape societies in ways their creators never fully anticipated. But there is still something important underneath all of this: when humanity receives more power, that power reveals something about humanity. And that is what we are witnessing again.
Here is the video “The Hero’s Journey, made with AI, Autumn 2025
AI is different
There is, however, something about artificial intelligence that feels fundamentally different from many of the technological revolutions that came before it, because so much of our previous technology expanded what our bodies could do, while AI is beginning to expand what our minds can do.
Machines amplified our physical strength. Cars amplified our mobility. Aircraft amplified our reach. Telecommunications amplified our voices. The Internet connected billions of human beings and gave us access to more information than any previous civilization could have imagined.
AI moves closer to something we have traditionally considered intimately human. It enters the territory of language, thought, pattern recognition, imagination, problem-solving and creation. It can help us write, translate, compose music, create images, analyze enormous quantities of information, recognize patterns, program software, research complex questions and bring ideas into form at a speed that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years ago. And because it comes this close to the territory of the human mind, I think the mirror becomes more intimate.
When I sit in front of AI, I bring myself into the conversation. I bring my questions, my assumptions, my curiosity, my limitations, my intentions and my values. Someone else can sit in front of a similar system and bring something entirely different. One person can ask how to understand another human being more deeply, while another wants to know how people can be influenced or manipulated. A doctor can use artificial intelligence to recognize patterns that might reveal disease earlier. A scientist can use it to see connections hidden inside millions of data points. An artist can use it to bring into form something that previously existed only in imagination. A student who never had access to a private tutor can suddenly have a patient conversational partner available at any hour.
And the same extraordinary capacity can be directed toward surveillance, deception, manipulation, warfare, exploitation and control. That is why I increasingly think of AI not only as a mirror.
AI is a mirror and an amplifier.
It reflects something about what we bring to it, but it can also increase our capacity to act upon what we bring. Human creativity can be amplified. Human curiosity can be amplified. Our ability to solve difficult problems can be amplified. But greed can also be amplified. Manipulation can be amplified. Fear can be amplified. The desire to dominate can be amplified.
And this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, because we cannot talk honestly about the dangers of artificial intelligence without also talking about the unresolved parts of human nature.
What are we building into the mirror?
Of course, AI is not a perfectly clean or neutral mirror waiting passively for us to look into it. Every AI system has already been touched by human choices before we ever encounter it. Someone decided what data it would learn from, what it should optimize for, what boundaries should be placed around it, what commercial model would support it and which values should influence its behavior. Behind the seemingly effortless conversation between one person and a machine lies an enormous human architecture of researchers, engineers, corporations, investors, governments, laws, economic interests and cultural assumptions.
So AI reflects humanity twice. First, through the systems we build. And then through the ways we use them.
When we look at the future of artificial intelligence, therefore, we might ask not only how intelligent these systems will become, but what we are actually optimizing them for. Are we primarily building for profit, efficiency and competition? Are we building for military advantage and geopolitical power? Are we building systems designed to capture more human attention, predict more human behavior and replace as much human labor as possible?
Or are we also asking how these tools might serve human dignity, creativity, education, health, wisdom, relationship and life itself? Those questions cannot be solved by better code alone, because they come from somewhere deeper than code. They come from what we value.
The video “Christ Consciousness – The Inner way of Divine Design”, made with AI, Autumn 2025.
The greatest danger is the gap
This is where I find myself returning to something that feels much larger than AI. Human technological evolution has moved at breathtaking speed, but I am not convinced our emotional, ethical and spiritual maturity has evolved at the same pace 🫣
We can communicate across the entire planet in seconds, yet we still struggle to listen to the person sitting across the table from us. We have technologies capable of seeing galaxies billions of light-years away, while human beings continue to divide themselves over ethnicity, religion, nationality and ideology. We have accumulated enough knowledge to understand the extraordinary interdependence of life on Earth, while continuing to behave as though what happens to another people, another species or another generation somehow has nothing to do with us.
We have become enormously powerful. But have we become equally wise? This is one of the deepest challenges of the Age of AI. It is possible for technological capability to accelerate far faster than human maturity, and when the distance between those two becomes too great, technology does not create the wound, it gives the wound more power.
A fearful humanity with more powerful tools can express fear on a larger scale. A humanity organized around domination can dominate more efficiently. A society driven almost entirely by profit can use intelligence to extract more profit. But the opposite must also be possible. A humanity becoming more conscious of its interdependence can use powerful tools to cooperate in ways we have never been able to before. Human compassion can gain greater reach. Knowledge can become more accessible. Creativity can be opened to people who were previously excluded from it. Problems that once required decades of work may become solvable within years.
The deepest danger is not simply that artificial intelligence becomes too intelligent. It is that human beings become technologically powerful faster than we become conscious of what we are doing with that power. And that is a very different conversation.
What kind of human being will AI amplify?
I use AI almost every day, and I have made a conscious choice to approach it as an ally. The more capable the technology becomes, the more important it becomes for me to know what belongs to me. My intuition cannot be outsourced. My discernment cannot be outsourced. My responsibility cannot be outsourced. My humanity cannot be outsourced.
AI can help me explore an intuition, but it cannot become my intuition. It can help me find language for something I am trying to express, but I still have to know whether those words carry my truth. It can challenge my thinking, reveal blind spots, organize information and show me perspectives I had not considered, but I still have to participate in the thinking. It can help me create, but I must remain in relationship with what is being created.
And this is where the Age of AI presents us with a strange paradox: the more sophisticated our machines become, the more deeply we may need to understand what it means to be human.
If we allow technology to do all our thinking, our capacity to think will weaken. If we allow it to make every decision, our discernment will weaken. If we ask it to create everything for us, we will forget the joy and struggle through which human creativity develops. If we allow algorithms to determine what deserves our attention, eventually we will forget that attention itself is something sacred that we can choose where to place.
But none of this means we have to reject the technology. It means we have to enter into relationship with it consciously. We can use AI without giving it our sovereignty. We can allow it to expand our possibilities without allowing it to define our values. We can let it become an extraordinary instrument without confusing the instrument with the musician. This distinction is increasingly important.
The mirror is already here
One day historians will look back at these years and see them as one of the great turning points in the human story, but right now we are simply living through it. There is no completed map for what comes next. There are genuine dangers, extraordinary possibilities and enormous questions that none of us can answer with certainty.
AI may be revealing something humanity has encountered every time we have acquired a new form of power: the technology itself cannot answer the deepest question for us. It cannot tell us what a good life is. It cannot decide what human dignity means. It cannot determine what deserves to be protected. It cannot decide how much is enough. It cannot decide whether our extraordinary intelligence should be directed toward domination or cooperation, extraction or restoration, war or peace.
Those remain human questions. This is why I no longer see AI only as something humanity has created outside itself. I also see it as a mirror we have placed in front of ourselves at a very particular moment in our evolution, a mirror powerful enough to reflect our brilliance and our shadow at the same time.
When we look into it, we may see our creativity, our curiosity and our almost limitless capacity to imagine something that has never existed before. But we may also see our fear, our greed, our hunger for control and our old inability to hold power without eventually asking whether that power can be turned against someone else. That is not a reason to turn away from the mirror. It is a reason to look more carefully.
Because the defining question of the Age of AI is not whether machines will become more like human beings. The defining question is whether this encounter will call human beings to become more fully human.
So I keep returning to the question that became the title of this week’s Field Reading: WHO DO WE BECOME IN THE AGE OF AI?
AI has not arrived to tell humanity who it is. It has arrived at a moment when humanity must reveal who we are. And if AI really is both a mirror and an amplifier, then one of the most important questions we can ask is no longer simply what this technology is capable of becoming. It is:
What kind of human being do I want AI to amplify?
And beyond ourselves, the greater question is:
What kind of humanity do we want our technology to amplify?