I cannot remember the first time I used ChatGPT, and yet today I reach for it almost daily: as an interactive search engine, a way of turning rambling voice notes into coherent prose, help with meal planning, or a tool for finding studies to cite in my writing.
It cannot be overstated how quickly artificial intelligence has moved from a curious, futuristic rumour to a daily companion; from a digital tool to something closer to a personal tutor or assistant; and now from novelty to near necessity.
In just a few short years, machines that once merely retrieved information now generate language and simulate reasoning. The problem is that we are no longer simply searching for answers. We are outsourcing thought itself.
At a recent talk, Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and chief executive of Longbeard and the creator of Magisterium AI, the world’s leading Catholic answer engine, named this moment with unsettling clarity. “We stand today at a Digital Rubicon,” he said. The age of information, defined by search engines and data retrieval, has quietly given way to something far more powerful: the age of outsourced and automated reasoning. This shift raises an urgent question for every human person. How do we stay human in an age of artificial intelligence?
Comfortingly, Sanders is careful to resist panic. Fear, he argues, often arises when we treat AI as something mystical or unknowable. “There is a tendency to view artificial intelligence as a kind of magic, a mysterious black box,” he noted. But Christians are a people of faith and reason. Tools are not to be feared, but rightly ordered.
Yet right ordering requires moral vision. As Sanders observed, we are already moving from simple chatbots to reasoners, and soon towards agents, systems capable not only of thinking but of acting autonomously. When machines can reason for minutes or hours before responding, generating and discarding thousands of possibilities, we must ask not only what they can do, but what they understand to be of value.
The danger, Sanders warned, is not intelligence itself, but formation without truth. Today’s dominant AI systems are trained on the statistical average of the internet, a vast moral cocktail of brilliance and banality, a mixture of insight and incoherence. “When these powerful new reasoning models think,” he explained, “they do so using the statistical average of the internet. They reason with the logic of the crowd.”
That logic is often utilitarian and relativistic, meaning we are building machines capable of superhuman reasoning at precisely the moment when our culture is least certain about what a human person actually is. Sanders described this convergence starkly: the devaluation of human labour through automation, paired with the devaluation of the human body through transhumanist ideology. Together, they form what he called an existential cliff.
Transhumanism, Sanders argued, is less innovation than ancient error reborn. “At its core, transhumanism is a modern form of the ancient Gnostic heresy.” It treats the body as obsolete machinery, vulnerability as a flaw, and finitude as a problem to be engineered away. Against this, Christianity offers a radically different claim: that God became flesh, and in doing so revealed that our limits are not defects, but the openings through which grace enters.
To stay human, then, is not to compete with machines on their own terms, but to reclaim what machines cannot do. An AI can generate a homily, but it cannot preach. It can simulate sympathy, but it cannot suffer alongside another. It can calculate the optimal outcome, but it cannot choose love. As Sanders put it plainly: “An AI can calculate, but only a soul can contemplate.”
This is why formation, not merely regulation, is the Church’s most urgent task in the age of AI. Without formed consciences, technological power will simply magnify confusion and deepen isolation.
The heart of staying human in the algorithm age is not nostalgia for a pre digital past, nor blind enthusiasm for a technological future, but fidelity to the Incarnation, to the dignity of the human person, and to the truth that intelligence finds its fullest meaning not in speed or scale, but in faith, hope and love. In an age of automated thinking, our task is not to think faster than machines, but to live more fully and more embodied lives than they ever could.
Now that artificial intelligence is doing more and more of the work for us, perhaps we will find ourselves with greater freedom for the people, tasks and responsibilities that actually matter. The future need not be dystopian or dazzlingly hyper advanced. Rather, it lies in ensuring that what is most important remains firmly at the centre: God our Creator, our proper understanding of ourselves as creatures, and the call to love our neighbour as ourselves.
With this foundation firmly in place, AI should not draw us further into isolation or distraction, but, when rightly ordered, should free us for deeper presence: more time for family and friends, for service, for prayer, and for the kind of human attention no machine could ever replicate.
