When Machines Can Do More, What Will We Choose to Keep Doing Together?

Artificial intelligence is quietly entering domains that, until very recently, we considered exclusively human. It writes, researches, translates, designs, composes music and solves problems. And every day, it does more.

Many tasks that once required years of training, experience and long hours of work can now be completed in seconds. It is fascinating. Yet as we watch everything technology is beginning to do for us, an even more pressing ethical and social question emerges: What will happen to the experiences we need to share with other human beings?

Automating a task is one thing; replacing the experience of social cohesion and a sense of belonging is quite another.

The THRIVE Model and Spiritual Health as Human Development

Drawing on developmental psychology and positive psychology, researcher Pamela Ebstyne King (2020) offers a particularly thought-provoking perspective for examining this technological transition. Her THRIVE model suggests that spiritual health and optimal human development can be understood through six fundamental dimensions:

• Transcendence: Inviting us to look beyond the immediate self and self-centred individualism.

• Habits and rhythms: Helping us turn what we value into structured daily practice.

• Relationships and community: Reminding us that human beings develop through dynamic social capital, rather than in isolation.

• Identity and narrative: Allowing us to understand who we are and the life story we are shaping.

• Vocation and purpose: Connecting us with what we feel deserves our time, energy and commitment to personal fulfilment.

• Ethics and virtues: Translating all of the above into concrete action: how we treat others and uphold their dignity.

What makes this approach interesting is that none of these dimensions depends exclusively on religious affiliation. In a much broader sociological and anthropological sense, they concern how we build a meaningful life.

Viewed through the lens of twenty-first-century challenges, the THRIVE model puts forward a central proposition: human well-being is not simply a matter of functioning efficiently or productively. It also involves having meaningful connections, a sense of direction and a framework of values we consider worthwhile.

Work, Identity and the Void Left by Automation

Here we encounter one of the defining debates of our time. For generations, work occupied a central place in the organisation of society. Our profession provided us with income, but also identity, status, recognition, daily structure and a profound sense of social usefulness.

What will happen as an increasing share of our cognitive and operational capabilities is replicated or enhanced by artificial intelligence systems?

Although global governance institutions and the social sciences do not yet have all the answers, this model offers an analytical framework for asking better normative and existential questions:

• If our relationship with employment changes, we will need to safeguard our vocation and purpose against a sense of existential emptiness.

• If screens and algorithmic dynamics fragment the public sphere, we will need to protect our in-person relationships and communities.

• If machines can produce content and information endlessly and automatically, we will need to think critically about what we want to say about ourselves: our identity and narrative.

• If our attention is constantly commodified, we will need habits and rhythms that help us regulate it and reconnect with ourselves and with others.

• If technology can meet individual needs with extraordinary immediacy, we may need to reclaim the collective dimension that transcends us.

• Finally, the greater our technological power, the more urgent it becomes to strengthen our virtues and ethical decision-making.

  
  

At this point, the conversation about spirituality and values ceases to be merely a mystical or private matter and becomes a priority for human rights and development policy.

The Paradox of Hyperconnectivity and the Right to Belong

We can be surrounded by extraordinarily intelligent tools and still experience profound unease. We can remain connected to the internet and feel alone. We can interact with an interface at any hour, receive immediate answers and develop projects from our own rooms. Yet these possibilities do not, in themselves, guarantee that we feel part of a community. Digital connection can facilitate encounters and sustain relationships, but an interaction with an automated system does not, on its own, amount to a human relationship grounded in reciprocity and shared responsibility.

Belonging within a friendship, a family or a community involves more than exchanging information. It means finding spaces where we can learn, contribute, create, converse, make mistakes and try again; spaces where our presence matters and where we also take responsibility for others. The value of some experiences extends beyond obtaining a result or a quick answer: it lies in sharing the journey and holding uncertainty together as we search for an answer.

This relational dimension has precedents in various traditions of thought. Jewish ethics, for example, offers a particularly thought-provoking formulation in a teaching attributed to Hillel in Pirkei Avot: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” (1:14; author’s translation). Read in the context of this essay, the question invites us to consider the limits of a life centred exclusively on individual interest and the place of our responsibility towards others.

This teaching can be brought into dialogue with contemporary psychology without equating their foundations or methods. An ethical text offers guidance on how to live; psychological research studies human experience and development through its own methods. A dialogue between them does not establish that the two perspectives are equivalent, but it can enrich our reflection on the meaning of human bonds.

As artificial intelligence expands, this reflection takes on new relevance: how can we make the most of its possibilities while cultivating relationships in which we recognise one another, care for one another and assume mutual responsibilities? Beyond what we can accomplish individually with the help of technology, one question remains open: what forms of shared life do we want to sustain?

Towards a Human-Centred Approach to Technology

I believe the real challenge for our generation is to reclaim—and safeguard, both institutionally and emotionally—the spaces where we can truly come together: study groups, discussion circles, volunteering initiatives, collaborative projects and communities of thought. Spaces where individuals are recognised and valued for their ethical contribution to the lives of others, rather than measured by their productivity, knowledge or economic performance.

The more capable machines become at executing tasks, solving problems and producing, the more imperative it becomes to protect what has no transactional utility: being present, listening actively, accompanying others through suffering, building mutual trust, caring for the vulnerable and loving.

Artificial intelligence does not force us into a binary choice between technology and human nature. Instead, it compels us to define, with greater rigour, urgency and clarity, what we mean by humanity.

When automated systems take on the burden of repetitive and even complex tasks, the fundamental human rights question of the future will not be which tasks we can delegate to an algorithm, but this: What experiences will we freely and consciously choose to continue sharing?

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References

• King, P. E. (2020). Thriving in adolescence: The role of spirituality and positive youth development. Routledge.

• European Union. (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). Official Journal of the European Union.