What we’re becoming: AI and future of human dignity

There’s a Substack I’ve been reading lately called Metatrends, run by Peter Diamandis and his team. They’re tracking AI’s exponential growth with the breathless optimism tech futurists are known for. They’re asking fascinating questions — questions about whether AI agents might deserve legal personhood, whether these systems could organize for labor rights, how we might achieve post-scarcity abundance by 2035.

The articles are smart. The questions are urgent. But I keep noticing what’s missing.

Nobody’s asking what we’re becoming in the process.

Diamandis writes about four great revolutions: the Scientific Revolution gave us the ability to understand nature’s laws. The Industrial Revolution mechanized production. The Digital Revolution connected the world. Now we’re entering Revolution Four — the AI Revolution — which promises to solve everything from disease to poverty. The opportunities are real.

But when Diamandis describes these earlier revolutions, he focuses entirely on what they solved. There’s not a word about what they cost us.

Take the Scientific Revolution. It gave us the experimental method and transformed our understanding of the natural world. Wonderful. But it also developed in us the social tendency to reduce everything to secular processes, to eliminate mystery, to turn the world into a storehouse of data points. We learned to see nature as mechanism, and eventually we learned to see ourselves the same way.

The Industrial Revolution brought incredible productivity gains, yes. But it also brought the transformation of work into impersonal function-performance. Time became monetized through “Taylorism” and time-motion studies. Work became something you did to people rather than with them.

And the Digital Revolution? We’re barely two decades in and already we can see the costs. We’re more “connected” than ever while being profoundly lonely. We’ve closed physical distance while becoming alienated from place, neighbor and home. We have unlimited information while our attention collapses.

If we approach “the AI Revolution” with only an eye to potential benefits, we’ll blindly accept the deleterious consequences to human life and society. We’ll automate ourselves into irrelevance without meaning to. We’ll outsource our humanity one convenience at a time.

Which brings me back to those questions about AI personhood and rights. Those are intriguing questions. But they’re downstream from more fundamental ones we’re not asking: What does it mean to be human in an age when machines can think? What are the essential rights of a human person when we’re building systems that might claim similar rights? What responsibilities can’t be delegated to an algorithm? What work shouldn’t be automated, not because machines can’t do it, but because we need to do it for the sake of our own humanity? What frictions and inefficiencies are actually necessary for true human living?

These aren’t just philosophical puzzles. They’re urgent questions about human formation. Every technological revolution has formed us whether we meant it to or not. The printing press didn’t just make books cheaper — it changed how we think. The smartphone didn’t just connect us — it rewired our brains. AI won’t just solve problems — it can reshape what we think it means to be a person.

And if we don’t reckon with that now — if we don’t develop a focused and refreshed understanding of human dignity in our present age — the power of this next revolution might leave us far more estranged from our humanity than any before it. More estranged from each other. From our work. From our callings. From God.

The Catholic tradition has wisdom here. We’ve always insisted that human beings aren’t just really smart animals or really complicated machines. We’re made in the image of God. We have an inherent dignity that can’t be earned or lost, can’t be optimized or automated. We’re called to work that makes us more fully human, not less. To relationships that are ends in themselves, not means to other ends. To worship of the One who made us, not the things we make.

Those truths don’t change just because our tools get exponentially more powerful. They become more important.

So yes, we can entertain questions about “AI rights” and abundance economics. But first, let’s talk about human personhood. About what we owe each other. About what we dare not lose in the rush toward what’s next.

This short article can’t accomplish this critical work (nor could I accomplish it myself, on my own). I am merely pointing out the need and the urgency of putting this work front and center, with absolute seriousness. The need to freshly understand the meaning of our humanity is as important — if not more important — than ever.

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