Politics today has a depressing predictability. On abortion, taxes, immigration, guns, and climate, battle lines are drawn, incentives clear, and tracks well worn.
AI is different. Politicians, commentators, and voters are still making up their minds. The lines have not hardened. Yet.
Futurists have long anticipated a technological “singularity,” when machine intelligence becomes so powerful that unenhanced humans can no longer keep pace. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil helped popularize this vision. In The Singularity Is Nearer, he dates it to 2045, envisioning human intelligence amplified through AI, nanotechnology, and other augmentations.
Futurist predictions often miss. Flying cars remain where Back to the Future Part II left them. Yet AI makes Kurzweil’s question harder to dismiss. What happens when machines stop looking like tools and start to resemble another intelligence?
Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations argues that the quest for superintelligence has acquired an almost religious intensity. Kurzweil sees biological and technological evolution moving toward qualities traditionally ascribed to God. AI raises questions of identity, consciousness, mortality, and destiny. The issue is not simply what machines will become, but what their becoming forces us to say about ourselves.
In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, Mallaby turns to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which defends human distinctiveness against equating machine intelligence with human consciousness or moral agency. Human beings are not information-processing machines but embodied persons capable of forgiveness, vulnerability, and moral responsibility. Their dignity rests in the image of God; the incarnation discloses what it means to be human.
The prospect of humanity surpassed by its inventions or consciousness uploaded as eternal life is hardly welcome. Asserting human uniqueness does not explain what distinguishes us.
A machine might answer convincingly without understanding meaning, but modern AI complicates that distinction. Large language models encode relationships among words and concepts and learn from feedback. Multimodal systems also combine language with images and detect patterns linked to emotion and intention.
None of this proves consciousness. Machines do not bleed or inhabit bodies; there is no evidence that they suffer, love, or mourn. Embodiment may be indispensable. Calling machine intelligence mere imitation does not settle the matter. The boundary between processing information and understanding it is harder to draw than the imitation label implies.
The argument turns back on us. Human brains are physical systems. They receive sensory information, learn from experience, and process electrochemical signals. If these facts do not fully explain what it means to be human, what remains? Consciousness, freedom, love, a soul, or the image of God?
The more machines reason, learn, create, and respond to human emotion, the less explanatory “mere imitation” becomes. Competence does not prove consciousness, and intelligence does not establish moral personhood.
The most unsettling possibility is not that machines will become human, but that, in explaining why they are not, we may discover how little agreement exists about what being human means.
Governing AI amid a global race for supremacy will require tradeoffs. Technology is never just engineering; it also asks what we are willing to sacrifice for growth, comfort, and efficiency. Greater safety may cost innovation, openness, or national advantage.
A demand for purity leads to paralysis and leaves decisions to the companies and states moving fastest. It is better to acknowledge tradeoffs than pretend they do not exist. If governments fail to choose deliberately, markets and strategic rivalry will choose by default.
Hedging is not indecision. It means pursuing gains while building safeguards and preserving room to change course. When stakes are high, and uncertainty is pervasive, that is the sounder bet.
AI alarmists and enthusiasts share more than either side admits. Both are intoxicated by exaggeration. Alarmists turn every advance into evidence of catastrophe. Enthusiasts treat technical achievement as moral progress and assume whatever is faster, smarter, and more profitable must be better.
One side mistakes uncertainty for catastrophe; the other mistakes capability for wisdom. Both prefer conviction to argument and evade the harder task: neither to worship AI nor to fear it, but to govern it.
AI grows more consequential by the day. The real danger begins when human beings surrender judgment, whether from panic or enthusiasm, to the systems they have built. The task is not to wish those systems away, but to accept responsibility for what has already been set in motion.
Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness, put that burden more starkly in A Wizard of Earthsea: “He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.”
Notes and reading
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI—Ray Kurzweil (2024). Kurzweil appears to be hedging his tenses. His 2005 bestseller was The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil—computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and the singularity’s most tireless evangelist. In a 2024 Guardian interview: “We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045, and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”
“AI and the Myth of the Machine”—Conor McGlynn in Compact (March 19, 2026). Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was a pioneering thinker on cities, architecture, and technology. McGlynn reads techno-optimism through Mumford’s “myth of the machine,” which Mumford called the “ultimate religion of our seemingly rational age.”
“God From the Machine: AI and the Future of Humanity”—Sebastian Mallaby, Foreign Affairs (August 10, 2026). Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“America’s Superintelligence Dilemma: How to Avoid an AI Catastrophe”—Hal Brands, Foreign Affairs (August 5, 2026). Brands is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Ursula K. Le Guin—novelist, essayist, poet, and one of speculative fiction’s great moral imaginations. In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”
Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.
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