A Meditation on Hope in the Age of AI
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“For everyone who feels the future bearing down on them too fast.”
Dear Skeptic
I know you’re worried. I am too, sometimes, in the early morning hours when the house is quiet and the headlines feel heavy. You look at the pace of change and wonder if anything solid will remain. You hear the promises and remember other promises that turned to ash. You worry about your job, your children’s future, the fabric of society that feels increasingly threadbare.
I won’t tell you not to worry. Worry, properly directed, is wisdom. It’s the voice that says ‘be careful’ when careful is called for. The skeptic’s instinct—to question, to doubt, to demand evidence—is one of humanity’s greatest tools for navigating uncertain terrain.
But I want to offer you some things to hold alongside the worry. Not to replace it, but to balance it. A both/and for a complicated time.
What Remains Constant
First: human beings have always lived in changing times. There has never been a generation that didn’t feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. The pace varies—some eras move faster than others—but the essential human experience of adapting to new realities is as old as our species. You come from a long line of people who faced the unknown and found ways through.
Second: the things that matter most are not the things that technology can replace. Meaning, purpose, love, belonging, growth, transcendence—these are not optimization problems. They’re not tasks to be automated. The deepest human experiences remain as available as ever to anyone who chooses to pursue them.
Third: for all its power, AI can’t actually choose. It can generate, predict, optimize, and persuade, but it can’t decide what matters. That remains exclusively human territory. And that means the future is still ours to shape—not by controlling the technology, necessarily, but by controlling what we do with it and who we choose to become in relation to it.
A Difficult Hope
I’m not offering you easy optimism. Easy optimism says everything will be fine, don’t worry, technology always works out. That’s not hope—that’s denial. The future contains real risks, real losses, real suffering that could be avoided with different choices.
What I’m offering is a difficult hope. The kind that sees clearly everything that could go wrong and chooses to work for what could go right anyway. The kind that acknowledges uncertainty and decides to act meaningfully despite it. The kind that refuses both naïve optimism and paralyzing despair.
This difficult hope doesn’t promise a good outcome. It promises that our choices matter, that the future isn’t determined, that there’s still time to shape where we’re going. It promises that you—skeptical, worried, thoughtful you—have a role to play in how this turns out.
The age of AI is not something happening to us. It’s something happening through us, by our choices, one decision at a time. And as long as that’s true, hope remains reasonable—not because the future is guaranteed to be bright, but because it’s still ours to light.