Artificial Intelligence and the Question We Forgot to Ask

This essay is part of the technology series on artificial intelligence and the coming spiritual crisis.

The New York Times recently published an article titled, A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You. It was written in the usual speculative optimism that tends to accompany tech coverage these days—curious, forward-looking, maybe even helpful in tone. But buried beneath the surface was a quiet terror: the sense that something fundamentally human is being traded away, and nobody is quite sure what we’re getting in return.

One reader’s comment said it plainly:

“How unspeakably dystopian.

No, wait. It is speakable, I can speak it, because I am a human being, alive in a body, with a lifetime of felt and considered experiences, capable of moral disgust, love of beauty, original thoughts, and all the meanings that arise out of shared humanity and mortality.”

It goes on to describe our need for connection, for participation in a living world, and for a life that is more than simulated usefulness. The final lines are devastating:

“People worry AI will kill us. They should worry it will make us want to die.”

Beneath the shock is a deeper question. One that we rarely ask amid the frenzy of innovation:

For whom are we doing all this?

Not just the coding, the engineering, or the automation—but the entire edifice of progress. Who is it meant to serve? What vision of the human being lies at the center of it? And if it is not built for the human being—our vulnerability, our relational needs, our longing for meaning—then who, or what, is it built for?

The Mirage of Advancement

The modern world runs on a simple equation: if something is newer, faster, or more efficient, it must be better. That’s the assumption driving everything from smartphones to generative AI. We move forward because we can. But we rarely stop to ask: Should we? Or more urgently: Why?

Artificial Intelligence is just the latest expression of this momentum. It promises convenience, cost-cutting, and creative expansion. But much of it is already being used to replace human labor, simulate relationships, and flood the internet with synthetic content. It can generate poems, paintings, and even false faces that appear indistinguishable from our own. But beneath the novelty lies a deeper loss.

Human beings are relational creatures. We thrive on love, respect, and participation in something real—something that acknowledges our aliveness. When technology separates us from each other, from the earth, from our inner life, it doesn’t just disrupt industries. It disrupts meaning itself.

So the question isn’t whether AI can replace your job. The real question is: Can it replace the reason you wanted to work in the first place?

The Forgotten Need

At the heart of a meaningful human life is a simple truth: we need to love and be loved.

This isn’t sentimentalism. It’s biology, psychology, and something deeper—something sacred. Our nervous systems are shaped by touch and voice. Our minds develop through imitation, storytelling, and shared attention. Even our sense of self arises in relation to others. We are not solo architects of meaning. We are made through contact, communion, and care.

Yet in the name of progress, we’ve increasingly built systems that remove us from each other. Social media turned conversation into content. Remote work turned colleagues into icons. And now AI promises to replace the people themselves—coworkers, artists, friends, even lovers—with something more “scalable.” But to what end?

If the result of all this innovation is greater loneliness, alienation, and meaninglessness, then we must ask: What, exactly, are we optimizing for? Who benefits from a world where the people closest to us are filtered through algorithms, and our labor—once an expression of contribution—is severed from real human need?

The reader who responded to the New York Times article understood this. Their words cut through the hype to what really matters:

“We are here to participate in a human society and its history, on this beautiful ravaged planet that we evolved on and to which we are utterly bound. The most important thing to us is other people.”

In that line is the essence of the crisis we now face. Not just an employment crisis. A spiritual one. The question isn’t what can AI do?—it’s what do we lose when it does it for us? And more poignantly: What happens when our tools no longer serve our longing to love and be loved—but replace it?

The False Promise of Substitution

Artificial Intelligence excels at imitation. It can write like us, speak like us, even mimic empathy with astonishing fluency. But no matter how advanced it becomes, there is one thing it cannot do: be us.

It can simulate human interaction, but not participate in it. It can generate art, but not feel beauty. It can predict emotional responses, but not ache, long, grieve, or love. And yet, much of its appeal lies in the illusion that these differences don’t matter—or worse, that they can be engineered away.

This is the false promise of substitution: that presence can be replaced with performance, and relationship with replication. That meaning is something that can be copied, scaled, and distributed.

But meaning doesn’t emerge from data. It emerges from life.

From sitting beside a dying friend. From watching your child sleep. From being seen, heard, touched, and understood. These moments aren’t interchangeable. They can’t be automated. They can’t be streamlined. They are messy, slow, and sacred—and they are what give our lives depth.

To let AI do our thinking, our expressing, even our remembering for us, is to trade away the very struggle that gives our humanity weight. It’s not that AI will kill us. As the commenter said: it might make us want to die. Not because it’s evil, but because it hollows out the world we once knew. It offers an infinite reflection of ourselves—and no one to hold us in it.

The tragedy isn’t that we’ll be replaced. The tragedy is that we’ll forget what we were replacing.

The Cost of Disconnection

We are already paying the price. Rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness have surged in recent years—not just among the elderly or isolated, but across all age groups, especially the young. We scroll endlessly, surrounded by avatars of others, yet starved for actual connection. We have access to more content than ever, and less wisdom. More communication, but less understanding. More stimulation, and less peace.

Technology promised to bring us closer. But what it often delivers is a kind of proximity without presence. We’re near—but not with. We’re reachable—but not known.

Now, with AI poised to generate much of what we see, read, and engage with, another layer is added to the disconnection: the uncertainty of what is real. A heartfelt message might be a prompt. A friend’s voice on the phone might be a clone. A beautiful photograph might be a hallucination. The very fabric of trust—already frayed—is at risk of dissolving completely.

And still, the machines hum forward. We create more tools to replace the ones we just built, faster each time, as if momentum itself were a virtue. But what is lost in this blur?

A society built on artificiality will not collapse all at once. It will decay by degrees—until our senses, our relationships, even our sense of self, are too dulled to remember what was lost. Disconnection is not an inconvenience. It is a wound. And it is deepening.

Turning the Question Around

If we’re brave enough to stop and ask, the question isn’t technical—it’s moral. It’s spiritual.

What are we building, and for whom?

This isn’t just a question for developers or CEOs. It’s a question for all of us, because the systems we accept become the world we live in. If we continue to build tools that replace rather than restore, distract rather than deepen, simulate rather than support—then we are not advancing. We are abandoning.

We need to turn the question around.

Not: What can AI do for us?

But: What do we want to become?

Not: How do we make AI more human?

But: How do we remain human in the age of AI?

That shift is everything.

Because if technology is to have a place in our future, it must be in service of the human. Not the consumer, not the user, not the data point—but the breathing, aching, meaning-making being who still longs to love and be loved.

Let AI write reports, manage calendars, sort spreadsheets—but let it never become the surrogate for relationship, for creativity rooted in lived experience, for the slow and sacred work of being here with each other.

Let us not build tools that replace our essence. Let us build only what supports it.

A Better Metric

Progress has long been measured in speed, scale, and profit. But these are the metrics of machines—not of meaning.

What if we measured progress differently?

What if the real markers of a healthy society were:

• How well we care for one another

• How present we are in our own lives

• How much beauty we create that cannot be bought or sold

• How deeply we belong to the world, and to each other

These aren’t things that AI can optimize. They aren’t outputs to be scaled. They’re signs of aliveness—of a society not just surviving, but being human together.

We are at a crossroads, and it’s not about whether AI will take our jobs. It’s about whether we will remember what it means to have a life—not just a productive one, but a real one. One rooted in love, in relationship, in reverence for a world that was not made by us, but which we are bound to, utterly.

“Every storm and earthquake, every mountain, forest, ocean, desert, and especially every star in the night sky that teaches us the scale of the universe and the feeling of awe… These are the pattern for beauty and goodness.”

That reader’s comment wasn’t just a protest. It was a plea for remembrance—for a return to the things that truly sustain us. In the face of synthetic everything, let us choose what is real. Not because it is efficient, not because it is profitable, but because it is worth everything.