I’ve been thinking about a strange, almost upside-down possibility with AI. For a long time, “the machine” has been a metaphor for the totalizing, industrial, and technocratic system, synonymous with modern civilization, that seeks to replace nature and human, organic life with artificial, controlled structures. Paul Kingsnorth writes about it extensively in his new book Against The Machine. It’s excellent and deeply unnerving. After reading, I turned off my phone for a week just to feel what it would be like. It was both frustrating and delightful. But as I’ve chewed on this topic and experimented more with AI, which Mr. Kingsnorth has permanently sworn off as the bullseye of machine-ness, the more my heart has changed, or perhaps evolved. There are two primary stories being told about AI. The first is one of techno-progress abundance that will solve all our problems, as if our problems were primarily a lack of abundance. The second is a story of grave danger, a fundamental fork in history that will lead us into dark robotic rule. One is the path of utopia, and the other of living hell. But what if neither story is what is happening? Since the industrial revolution, technology’s trajectory has been one of humans becoming more like machines. Modern work has quietly trained us to act like machinery with repeatable tasks, narrow lanes, endless throughput, constant responsiveness, and performance measured by the hour. You can make a good living being a dependable machine…and slowly forget you’re a person. The assumption is that any technological progress will continue to lead us down that path. Some say it’s worth it, others say it’s not. But what if both analyses are coming at it from the wrong direction? When AI starts doing the most machine-like parts of the work shockingly well, where does that leave us? Instead of making humanity more like a machine, I wonder if it does the opposite. Could the actual machines remove the “machineness” from the human? What if we’re living in a time of re-enchantment, of re-learning what it means to be human? If software can execute the repetitive, the scripted, the procedural, the high-volume “move this from column A to column B” work, then what’s left for us is the work that is stubbornly, beautifully human. Not just thinking or making, but something deeper. In Genesis, humans aren’t introduced as labor, but as rulers. Work is pre-fall, for our good, and God’s glory. We’re introduced as image-bearers. We’re made to reflect God in the world, to be vice-regents, to reign and rule with justice and mercy. This means we aren’t primarily producers. We’re persons. Human beings, not human doings. That has implications. If you believe people are made in God’s image, then creativity and meaning are fingerprints, not luxuries. Relationships are central, not merely “soft skills.” Discernment, courage, and responsibility are a calling. We are uniquely made to trust, care, tell the truth, own outcomes, and be a neighbor, a friend, and a lover. AI can imitate outputs. It can predict patterns. It can accelerate execution. But it can’t carry moral weight. It can’t love. It can’t repent. It can’t take responsibility. It can’t look another human in the eye and choose courage over approval. It can’t suffer with someone. It can’t forgive. It can’t be faithful. And it can’t answer the question underneath every technological leap, “What is this for?” At a fundamental level human acts are irreducibly social and moral, happening between people, not just between a worker and a task, a problem and a solution. We are not merely moist economic robots seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Technique, or efficiency, isn’t the point and shouldn’t be the goal. The soul isn’t measured by a stopwatch, nor the soul’s worth measured by its GDP contribution. Real human flourishing is local, relational, and responsibility-soaked. It’s face-to-face life where you can’t outsource the consequences of your choices and where you can see God’s movement in the eyes of those you know and love. The good life happens in walking the path with others, in sharing both suffering and joy, and not in reaching the summit and the rewards. Our loves shape us. We become what we worship. If we worship frictionless convenience and use it merely as a means of selfish gain, we become shallow and incurved, turned in on ourselves in self-reliance and self-glorification. If we receive convenience as a gift and use it to refocus our attention on God and others, we’ll become more fully human. Could we use AI to allow us the freedom to become more human, to be more creative and joyful in bearing God’s image, or will AI use us to flatten, systematize, and productize life? That’s the fork in the road with AI. AI can absolutely be used to dehumanize, with more surveillance, more speed, more noise, more extraction, fewer jobs with dignity, and fewer reasons and opportunities to look someone in the eye. But it can also be used to rehumanize, with less drudgery, less paperwork, and less rote work. Fewer hours spent being a “human API” means more time in the work that actually gives life. Abundance as a gift to be received and used to bless others creates margin to love more and better. Abundance as gain to be anxiously strived towards and hoarded for comfort, safety, and pleasure will always result in suffering. I’m optimistic, not because I think AI is harmless, nor because it won’t have far-reaching and painful implications, nor because I think humanity will suddenly wake from its Tower of Babel delusion, but because it might expose a lie we’ve lived under for a while – that your value is your output. If AI can out-output you, then you’re forced to locate your dignity somewhere else, which is exactly the point. Your dignity was never up for competition with a tool, and was never to be earned. Your dignity is bestowed. When the machine can do the machine work, we have fewer excuses to keep asking humans to live like machines, especially ourselves. My hope is that we use AI to automate the inhuman so we can return to the human. Leaders should stop rewarding performative busyness and start rewarding discernment, creativity, judgment, honesty, clarity, and care. Parents should reclaim attention and focus that attention on what matters most. Creators should create with the lightheartedness of quite literally being able to speak things into existence, like our Creator. Communities should thicken, with margin to sit, sip, and chat slowly, with intention. Work should become less about proving you’re an indispensable cog and more about serving something true. We should become harder to manipulate because we’re less exhausted. More of us should rediscover what it means to be human. In Psalm 8, the psalmist looks at the vastness of creation and asks, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” AI will tempt us to answer, “a bundle of tasks to be accomplished.” But God’s answer is different. You’re an image-bearer made to reign and rule with truth and love, not a small piece of machinery in some larger machine. If AI helps us stop pretending otherwise, if it frees more people from the tyranny of mindless, endless, and dehumanizing work, then this revolution might not be the eclipse of humanity. It might be, in a strange mercy, an invitation back to it.