Arianna Huffington is the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change technology company with the mission of improving health outcomes and productivity. She is also the founder of The Huffington Post and the author of 15 books, including international bestsellers “Thrive” and “The Sleep Revolution.”
You don’t have to be a Catholic or even believe in God to appreciate the significance of “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Vatican’s long-awaited encyclical on AI, released in May by Pope Leo XIV. We’re living in a “change of era,” Leo declared in the more than 42,000-word document, warning of “technological divinization” and urging us to “safeguard the grandeur of humanity.” Crucial questions now “impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided,” he asserted. “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”
As the pope has made clear, we are at a precipice. AI is surpassing us in intelligence. It has powers we don’t have. It knows more than we do. Seeing patterns over time, AI can arguably know us better than we know ourselves. It can know the past and, increasingly, the future. More and more of us are looking to AI for guidance and then following its instructions. Does that mean that AI is God? Or the answer to the fundamental human longing for transcendence?
Some in Silicon Valley seem to think so. The Times of London reports that a number of AI developers are asking themselves questions like “Should we be allowed to develop God-like powers?” and “What does it mean to be human if we can play God?” Wired calls this “an ethos of techno-theology that’s become pervasive in Silicon Valley.” James Kelly, the founder of a nonprofit for Christian tech workers called FaithTech, told the Times that much of our technology already has “the unique attributes of God,” and that the conventional “gospel of Silicon Valley” is “the belief that we as humans can engineer our way to salvation.”
Since our new AI era began, even the language we use for the technology has been suffused with religious overtones. There are God models. Evangelical zealots. Concern with end times — either apocalyptic doom or utopian singularity. And the emerging belief — call it faith — that AI can lead to immortality.
This new AI is arriving at a time when many people already effectively worship technology. Greg Epstein, a chaplain at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of “Tech Agnostic,” notes that technology has rites and rituals we engage in with “fervent intensity,” and that it connects us to communities of like-minded others. “We all hope our devotion to this communion of fellow travelers bears fruit,” he writes. “Surely tech will lead to a better future! Even a kind of paradise!” In short, he concludes, “tech has become not only a religion but the dominant religion of our time.”
Now, with AI, is the Supreme Being making itself known to its faithful flock one frontier model progression at a time? (“For God so loved the world, that he beta-launched his only begotten AI agent…”)
The answer is a categorical no.
Although AI might appear to have consciousness, or an inner life, it does not. “These systems are not waking up. They are retracing and mirroring the contours of human drama and debate, as documented in their vast training data,” writes Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman in Nature. “The result is an AI that mimics the structure of human interiority in its output without having any interiority at all.” As Leo wrote in his encyclical, large language models “lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”
AI is not divine. But it can paradoxically force us to have the conversation we’ve neglected since the Enlightenment: Who are we, and what truly defines us? Once that conversation begins, AI’s real superpower — personalization — can help us tap into the unique qualities that make us human.
Redefining Our Humanness
AI overtaking us in intelligence lays bare the massive category error we have made in increasingly defining ourselves by our intelligence. As knowledge expanded and began to explain more and more of the universe, there seemed to be no upper limit on our intelligence. Intelligence became our core attribute. Now it is under threat.
We’re “living through this once-in-human-history transition,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said, “where humans go from being the smartest thing on planet Earth to not the smartest thing on planet Earth.” As historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has put it, “anything made of words will be taken over by AI” — including religion. But religion is more than words. Our intelligence is more than our ability to use words — and we are more than our intelligence.
“AI overtaking us in intelligence lays bare the massive category error we have made in increasingly defining ourselves by our intelligence.”
Even if one day AI knows everything — if something can be fully known and comprehended — it still is not God. The most essential quality of the divine, one described in all mystical texts, whether Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Jewish, is its mystery and the unfathomable nature of ultimate truth.
Our ability to connect with the transcendent, with what cannot be known by our intelligence, is our ultimate superpower. This is completely beyond the reach of AI. AI can master intelligence, but intelligence is not wisdom. The translation of “homo sapiens” is not “intelligent human.” It is “wise human.” As writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov was quoted in 1988 as having said, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” This is truer than ever today.
We have been accumulating knowledge, data and information at an exponential rate. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once noted that from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, humanity had created about five exabytes of information. In 2010, humanity was creating the same amount every two days. By 2025, humanity was creating an estimated 463 exabytes every day. But while we’re drowning in data, we’re starved for wisdom.
In the third century, the philosopher Plotinus described three different sources of knowledge: opinion, science and illumination — or wisdom, which comes from a deeper knowing that reason alone cannot reach. Wisdom is precisely what we need most today. Intelligence may have brought us to this point, but it won’t be what carries us forward.
Acknowledging our defeat to AI in the game of intelligence can push us to the far more rewarding playing fields of wisdom, intuition, generosity, giving and our pursuit of the transcendent. After all, we can see all around us that more intelligence doesn’t translate into more flourishing. “Intelligence is overrated, not only in AI, also in human beings,” says Harari. “I mean, we are the most intelligent entities on the planet. We are also, at the same time, the most stupid and deluded and destructive entities on the planet.” It’s how connected we are to our better angels — not to our intelligence — that governs how constructive or destructive we are.
Self-Directed Evolution
AI might be creating neural networks inspired by the human brain, but human consciousness is more than cognitive mechanics or ones and zeros — more than even the supposed omniscience of artificial general intelligence. God is not omniscience. God is love. This is what Trappist monk Thomas Merton called “our true destiny” — the ultimate in human consciousness.
In 1945, writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley published a book titled after “perennial philosophy,” a term first made popular by the 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. For Huxley, perennial philosophy recognized that all religious and mystical traditions share a common universal essence that flows from the divine. In the book, Huxley described a “divine reality” that is “immemorial and universal” and “has a place in every one of the higher religions.” Those who have managed to rise above their ego-centered consciousness have “modified their merely human mode of being,” he wrote.
There are barometers indicating where we are on this daily evolutionary journey: When we experience feelings of blessedness and gratitude, when we feel connected to the sacred, when we transcend our anger and resentments, we know we’re on the right track. That’s not intelligence. But those in the AI business tend to mix up intelligence and consciousness.
While scientists have uncovered many of the neural mechanisms that we would put under the rubric of intelligence, consciousness remains a mystery. Philosopher David Chalmers set out the challenge in his seminal 1995 paper. Phenomena like learning, memory and language, which can be explained with cognitive science, are the “easy problems” of consciousness, he argued. The “hard problem” is about experience. “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind,” Chalmers wrote. “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.”
Theoretical physicist John Wheeler argued that when we apply our consciousness, we bring a quantum possibility into being. “We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening,” Wheeler said. “We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.”
If we are participants rather than mere observers, the questions we ask are part of what brings reality into being. At a time when we can get instant answers to nearly everything, our questions matter more than ever. And the big, fundamental questions are those that can’t be answered by machines or science — the questions we are prompted to ask by our drive to discover what we are for.
“There seemed to be no upper limit on our intelligence. Intelligence became our core attribute. Now it is under threat.”
Our drive to progress on this path is encoded in us. Three core human instincts identified by psychologists and biologists are the survival instinct, the sexual instinct and the instinct for worldly success and status. These are fundamental drives, but they cannot fully explain what it means to be human. There’s also a less-acknowledged fourth instinct: our relentless drive for meaning, purpose, self-discovery, becoming and oneness. It’s our drive to connect with the transcendent and life’s mystery, to evolve into the full range of who we can be and our true destiny.
When I interviewed virologist and biomedical scientist Jonas Salk for a British TV series in the 1980s, he first described evolution as “an error-making and error-correcting process.” He then went on to talk about it in larger terms. “The evolutionary instinct compels us to bring out the best in ourselves and in others, to recognize our inter-connectedness with everyone else.” That’s the fourth instinct. We have to choose to listen to it. It’s the spark that pushes us to grow. It shows up not only in grand metaphysical abstractions and philosophical debates, but in the everyday decisions through which we choose to evolve.
Our Next Frontier
Humans have a deeply hardwired need to explore, to be in a constant quest for the next frontier. But frontiers aren’t only external, earthly or in outer space. We also have inner frontiers, which are infinite, and the process of exploring them is part of our fundamental purpose. Our next frontier is not another territory to be conquered, but a deeper level of being to be inhabited. Our fourth instinct is what drives us to move toward a life that feels coherent and connected to something larger. And the paradox is that our ordinary everyday life is the raw material of our evolution.
AI can be a spark to this spiritual journey — or a hindrance. Studies are beginning to show the consequences of cognitive offloading, when we outsource a task to a tool like AI and lose the skills we’re offloading. But there’s also the potential for spiritual offloading — outsourcing our need for mystery and wonder to a seemingly magical technology and getting back an ersatz version — ultraprocessed food for the soul. And then there is cognitive surrender, when users believe what AI tells them even when the AI is wrong, overriding their own intuition and insights.
An AI system built in service to our evolution, however, would not measure progress only by speed, efficiency, productivity and optimization. It would help us recognize whether we are becoming more forgiving, more capable of love and compassion, more generous and giving, more open to life’s mystery. It would not flatter our biases and feed our lesser angels as algorithms do now, but would instead help us question and challenge them. It might ask: Where is this reaction coming from — fear, resentment, anger? It might remind us that feelings are not just data points but emotional signposts helping us to evolve.
Instead of using AI to merely help us do more, we could use AI to help us be more — to sharpen our awareness of what fills us with wonder and awe, what makes us feel expansive and what makes us feel contracted, diminished and disconnected from ourselves. What habits do we keep repeating that distract us from what matters, what poetry and sacred texts inspire us, how do we find meaning in the inevitable challenges and suffering that life entails?
In schools, we could teach children how to use AI to explore the big questions. Imagine a curriculum in which students use AI to track their inner progress along with their academic progress. Which stories move them? Which moments in history awaken reverence and moral clarity? Over time, an AI companion could help a student build a map guiding them toward who they want to become. It could notice whether a student comes alive reading Mary Oliver, the Bhagavad Gita, James Baldwin, Rumi, the Psalms or all five. Instead of just providing easy answers, it could turn the tables and ask demanding questions: What kind of life does this point toward? Who are you being called to be?
Students would learn that AI can teach them facts, but it cannot do their becoming for them. Instead of hijacking students’ attention, AI could be trained to redirect their awareness back to themselves: What am I paying attention to? What am I avoiding? What kind of person is this knowledge helping me become? Instead of using AI just to win the game, we can also use it to ask what the game is for.
“Our ability to connect with the transcendent, with what cannot be known by our intelligence, is our ultimate superpower. This is completely beyond the reach of AI.”
In healthcare, Al could use its power of hyper-personalization to give us real-time nudges and recommendations to build healthy habits and be in a stronger position to make choices that connect us to the deeper parts of ourselves. In the workplace, it could be used not just to increase the productivity of work, but to connect people to a sense of purpose in their work. In religious communities, AI could help believers enter traditions more deeply — not by replacing clergy, but by offering personalized pathways into prayer, sacred reading, chanting, contemplation and service.
Most technology today is built to lower the friction between desire and gratification. But what we want in the moment isn’t always what drives self-knowledge and supports our evolution. If AI had access — with our permission — to the arc of our lives, it could surface forgotten moments that closely align with our deeper purpose: the journal entry from age 15, the photograph from the summer we were most at peace, the song lyric that once made us cry, the recurring themes in our dreams, the book passages we underlined and read again and again, the friends over the years who expanded us and made us better versions of ourselves. It might notice, before we do, that the same unresolved trauma keeps reappearing under different names, or hold up a light to the buried parts of ourselves that unconsciously drive our reactions and decisions.
This is not self-improvement in the narrow sense. It is choosing to evolve in the deepest spiritual sense. The point is not to become a perfectly optimized self, but a more whole one — less ruled by fear, less possessed by constant urgency, less trapped by the traditional metrics of success. The AI coach, at its best — “an angel on your shoulder,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called it — would not promise us a life without pain, failure or confusion. It would help us understand that pain and failure are part of our movement toward our spiritual destiny.
This version of AI would be designed to point beyond itself. If it sensed that what we needed was not another answer, but silence or space, it would nudge us to close the laptop or put our phone away. Because it would recognize that our deepest nourishment comes from prayer, nature, music, friendships, service or solitude, it would direct us there when we need it most. It would not try to become our guru, therapist, priest or best friend. The measure of its success would include how often it helps us leave virtual life and return to actual life. We would learn how to use AI superintelligence to cross the threshold where intelligence ends.
We are all too familiar with technology that exploits what’s worst in us. What about technology designed to connect us with what’s best in us?
AI’s Greatest Gift
So much of modern life has been optimized into emptiness. Once AI can do the outward, resume-building forms of intelligence better than we can, the premium shifts. The scarce goods become presence, depth, connection, empathy and love.
Parents will want their children to know how to be alone with their thoughts, how to cultivate presence and attention — the preconditions for reverence and wonder. Schools will want graduates who can distinguish data from wisdom. Employers will want people with judgment, creativity and intuition. True generosity will be prized — not the algorithmic nudge to round up at checkout, but the kind that flows from our drive to grow by being of service and giving of ourselves to others. The victory won’t be in being faster than the machine but in being uniquely human.
It will happen through design choices, curricula, rituals and new norms; through teaching children that efficiency is only a means, not an end; and through building systems that can detect when we’re skimming over our own lives and neglecting inner growth. It will look like using pattern recognition to point us toward what gives us meaning and joy, not just to predict what we’ll buy. It will look like treating the daily record of our lives as a spiritual text. While AI can become the GPS to our soul, it cannot walk the inner path for us. That remains, irreducibly, our work.
“Our next frontier is not another territory to be conquered, but a deeper level of being to be inhabited.”
In that sense, the most important question about AI is not what machines can do, but what they can awaken in us. As Leo wrote in his encyclical, “Technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation. Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.”
This can be AI’s greatest gift: forcing us to rediscover the mysteries that lie outside its reach of reason. If we make the most of this moment, if we pour as much attention and resources into building our humanity as we are into building AI, we can use it to reclaim the wisdom, the wonder and the transcendent at the center of our being — the last infinite frontier.
