Humanity vs. AI: Can Technology Solve Our Deepest Problems?

Looking at our world there is undeniable beauty, yet it only takes a glance at the news to see suffering, pain and division. Beneath humanity’s achievements lies a persistent moral and relational brokenness. This raises a fundamental question: what is the solution to humanity’s problem?  

A number of competing answers emerge. In this article we will compare two particularly prominent answers. The first is the technological answer, that with enough intelligence and data we can reduce human suffering and facilitate flourishing, largely by removing limitations on humanity. The second is the Christian answer, that humanity’s problem is not a lack of intelligence or power but a fracturing in our relationship with God and one another. We require reconciliation rather than optimisation.  

Where Does AI Fall Short? 

Through emerging technologies such as AI, we are increasingly able to push back the limits of human life. Physical constraints such as illness and even death are approached through advanced diagnostics, genetic engineering and the possibility of merging humans with machines. Boundaries of time and space are eroded by smartphones that allow for instantaneous, worldwide communication. The underlying assumption is that with more information and smarter systems we can build a better world. This hope is not without foundation, if AI can accelerate the cure for cancer, that will alleviate real suffering.  

The question is not whether technology can do good, but whether it reaches the heart of the problem. 

Despite advances in neuroscience and philosophy, the scientific community still struggle to define consciousness – what it is, and whether it is ultimately reducible to physical states. There is reason to think that inner experience cannot be reduced to physical or computational processes. Whatever you conclude regarding that question, it remains deeply contested whether AI could ever genuinely share in such experience at all. It can mirror human expressions of joy, grief and love, but there is no compelling evidence that it experiences them, or will ever be able to realise the kinds of features that enable human brains to generate consciousness. AI cannot resolve questions of meaning, loneliness, or identity because it does not share in them. It cannot form real relationships or exercise moral responsibility.

Technological solutions are powerful but partial.  

The Uncomfortable Truth About Optimising Humans 

There is also a subtler risk in machine-driven solutions; that humanity becomes measured by machine-like standards. As systems that optimise and evaluate become more influential, their logic can influence the way we think about human life. We risk celebrating output and efficiency above dignity. Iain McGilchrist in his landmark work, The Master and His Emissary[1], expounds the roles of the left and the right brain hemispheres. The hemispheres are both involved in virtually everything we do but they attend to the world in fundamentally different ways. The left hemisphere is more analytical and detail oriented, focussing on specific parts. The right hemisphere on the other hand serves the role of understanding the whole, rather than assembling it from distinct parts. The right serves to understand meaning, empathy and interconnectedness. In his recent writing and thinking, McGilchrist poses that the AI revolution threatens to allow the left hemisphere to dominate over the right, thus focussing too intently on distinct parts and losing some of the integrated meaning and beauty that comes with seeing a whole. 

We can see a danger that beauty, which takes time to craft, or understanding which is gleaned over a lifetime slowly become hindrances in a world that elevates progress as the highest good. 

Wendell Berry observed that it is easy to imagine that “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines”[2] There is a danger that we reshape ourselves to fit the tools originally designed to serve us; seen as projects to be optimised rather than persons called to relationship[3].  

What If Our Weaknesses Aren’t The Problem? 

Rather than transcending our limits, the Christian answer is a transformation of the human heart. The core of the Christian story is not that humans need to take power for themselves, to become like gods, without limit and flaw. We see the opposite: God enters the brokenness of humanity, becoming one of us in Jesus. He humbled himself, embracing weakness, suffering and even death. Through Jesus we see dignity given to humanity, not through power or optimisation, but through love. In his resurrection, something unstoppable is set in motion whereby death and sickness will one day be defeated, not through humans becoming like gods but by God becoming like us.  

Pope Leo XIV[4] writing on the relationship between faith and AI suggests that our limitedness as humans uniquely opens us to depth of relationship with others. Rather than seeing limitations as a flaw to fix, we should understand them as spaces for relationship, dependence and love. Vulnerability reveals the dignity of human persons. What can truly speak to the problems of division and suffering and loneliness? Not better systems but transformed hearts. 

True progress looks like love, relationship and moral responsibility. Machine intelligence, however compelling, cannot replicate self-giving love and genuine friendship.  

Where Does That Leave Us? 

Technology that serves humanity can be a wonderful thing, for instance diagnostic programmes that improve patent outcomes or translation tools that enable genuine conversation across language barriers. It is however vital that we keep the real primary, and the virtual secondary. In Jesus we see a God who both loves humanity and takes seriously the brokenness of the world. Dying on the cross, Jesus addresses the problem of human death, and he sets forth a vision for a new creation centred on love, relationship and worship. Ultimately as Pope Leo XIV writes, “what saves humanity is the divine love that descends into the most fragile point of our history and renews it from within”[5]. In Jesus’ life we see the truest picture of what it means to be human.  

 References

1. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010)
2. Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
3. Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas of his Holiness Pope Leo XIV on safeguarding the human person in the time of articfical intelligence. Accessed 02/06/26
4. Ibid
5. Ibid