‘Artificial Intelligence and Genuine Humanity’ - Rev Adam Slate

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Introduction

Countries and companies are pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence technology. The headlines promise it will solve our problems, automate our tasks, and make us more productive. And it's true—AI can diagnose diseases, translate languages, compose music, and organise our lives. It's powerful, and it is changing our world.

Many of us are looking at the implications of AI and the question of how to engage with it, asking ‘What AI can do?’ and ‘How can it help us?’ Religious communities are no exception. But as people of faith, it is also essential to flip the question. We should also be asking ‘What can't it do?’ Not just asking ‘How will machines change us?’ but also ‘What in us cannot be changed?’ Rather than ‘What should we automate?’ we have to ask ‘What must we protect?’

Because artificial intelligence, for all its brilliance, will never know what Mary Oliver knew when she watched that grasshopper. It will never understand what it means to kneel in the grass, to be idle and blessed, to ask: What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

What AI Can and Cannot Do

An algorithm can tell you everything about grasshoppers—species, behaviour, probabilities. But it cannot wonder. It cannot be knocked sideways by the particular beauty of this grasshopper, this moment. AI can inform us, but it cannot be moved emotionally like us. It can compute, but it cannot care.

Just to be clear: I am not here to trash artificial intelligence. I am figuring out how to embrace it just like many of us. Every generation fears new technology. Socrates worried that writing would ruin our memories and weaken our mind. The printing press was supposed to corrupt youth. Calculators would make us lazy. But we humans have a remarkable ability to adapt.

And artificial intelligence offers real gifts. Medical AI spots patterns in X-rays that doctors miss, saving lives. Language models help students with disabilities write. AI optimizes energy grids, and can help cut carbon emissions–though it is worth noting that it also requires a great deal of computing resources. Artificial intelligence can free us from mundane tasks and drudgery—if we use that freedom wisely.

But this is where our spiritual practice matters; where Unitarian principles stop being abstract and become practical.

We affirm every person’s worth, which means we cannot outsource moral decisions to machines. When AI is used in hiring, prison sentencing, loan approvals, or healthcare, we have to ask: Who built this intelligence? Whose values are in the code? And whose dignity might get crushed by the output?

AI learns from data, and data reflects history—including our history of discrimination and injustice. An algorithm trained on past hiring can replicate past prejudices. A system trained on policing data can perpetuate old inequities. The machine does not judge whether these patterns are just; it just replicates them efficiently.

What Wisdom Can Guide Us?

So our first responsibility is asking questions. Demanding transparency and ethical practices. Holding human beings accountable for decisions that affect human lives. The algorithm can suggest, but we decide. The system can recommend, but we judge. This is not optional; it is a responsibility of being human.

As Unitarians, we also prioritise justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. AI can facilitate connections, but it cannot create relationships. It can simulate conversation, but it cannot listen with both a mind and a heart. It can generate responses, but it cannot understand vulnerability, grief, joy, or love.

It is worth worrying about lonely people turning to AI companions for emotional support. Not because technology cannot help—therapy apps have their place—but because real relationships require mutual vulnerability, mutual risk, mutual change. When I share my pain with you, I am not looking for the optimal response. I am looking for you to hear me, to bear witness to my suffering, and to be present with me in our sometimes clumsy, imperfect, and beautifully human way.

Artificial intelligence can give us information, but it cannot give us wisdom. Wisdom is different from information. It emerges from lived experience, making mistakes and learning, and from facing uncertainty with courage. From choosing love even when logic tells us to do otherwise. Wisdom is not generated; it is earned.

We can draw a third insight from our commitment to spiritual growth. We are not static beings with a fixed set of problems to be solved. We are meaning-making creatures, forever interpreting our experiences and creating and recreating ourselves through the stories we tell.

An AI can analyze patterns in religious texts, but it cannot have a religious experience, or have faith in a Divine power that it cannot prove exists. It cannot be left in awe or wonder at something it does not understand.

Artificial intelligence can generate poetry, but it cannot be transformed by beauty. It can choose the words of Mary Oliver, but it cannot be the person who sets down the poem, walks outside, and falls down in the grass to really see the grasshopper.

This is what contemplative practice teaches us. This is what prayer, meditation, and mindful presence cultivate: the capacity to be fully alive in the moment, to encounter reality directly rather than through screens and algorithms and curated feeds.

In a world of artificial intelligence, genuine humanity means cultivating our capacity for attention; for presence; for the sacred pause before we act. Algorithms work fast; we must learn to achieve wisdom by slowing down.

Living Faithfully

So how do we live faithfully in this age of emerging AI?

We can stay curious and informed. Learn how these systems work; ask questions. Do not surrender our agency to technological inevitability. Remember that AI is built by people, funded by people, deployed by people—and it can be regulated, redirected, and reimagined by people.

We can cultivate what machines cannot replicate. Things like creativity that springs from embodied experience; like moral courage that chooses principle over convenience. Compassion that responds to suffering with presence in addition to solutions. Community that holds complexity and embraces conflict, yet still chooses radical inclusivity and a commitment to love and justice.

We can safeguard authentic human encounter. We can show up for each other, even as we take advantage of technology to make showing up easier over large distances. We can practice the awkward, inefficient, irreplaceable art of being together.

And finally, we can ask Mary Oliver's question seriously: What will we do with our one wild and precious life? Not ‘what will maximize productivity?’ Not ‘what will the algorithm recommend?’ But what will bring meaning, purpose, joy? What will serve love? What will honor the Sacred?

Here is the truth we need to keep in mind: artificial intelligence is powerful, but it is not wise. It is intelligent, but not alive. It can process information about life, but it cannot live—it cannot feel sand beneath its feet, it cannot be moved to tears by injustice, it cannot choose hope over despair.

We can. This is our inheritance… and our responsibility… and our gift as humans.

AI Disclosure

It may have occurred to some of you already that a good way to offer a Sunday gathering on artificial intelligence would be to use AI to plan the service. And that is what I did.

I provided our standard order of service, guidance about today’s topic, and our congregational context, and asked Claude.ai to draft the gathering; from the message to the opening and closing words to the story.

I reviewed everything as the service took shape, editing things to sound like my voice, rewriting, or asking Claude to do another draft. I changed the story we read earlier to remove references to the child’s gender because it was not necessary, and I caught that in the first version of the message, Claude forgot to include this disclaimer that I am making right now about having used AI. Jen reviewed the hymn suggestions and made some changes.

Most importantly, I considered every idea to make sure I could get behind what I am saying. I believe I exercised my responsibility as your minister to ensure that the gathering represents both my values and Unitarian values… just as I do every week.

I do not think it’s perfect. If I had written the message from scratch I might have said more about the energy requirements of AI. Claude picked some classic hymns, and we would have needed to spend a little more time to choose music that was less well known or went outside of our Unitarian tradition. And as much as I love the poem ‘The Summer Day,’ Mary Oliver is a pretty obvious choice for a Unitarian service.

But here’s the thing: I estimate that using AI to develop the service saved me at least ten hours this week. I did not have to work late or spend time on my days off finishing the message. My ADHD brain did not have to find as many big uninterrupted timeslots to work, or transition back and forth between other tasks.

I had an extra day this week for planning, outreach, and pastoral issues. I followed up with a few congregants that I have been wanting to follow up with. I attended the Tuesday meditation group for the first time. I worked on a proposal for the trustees that has been sitting for several months. I developed a template to facilitate how I work with couples to plan weddings. I had time to go deep into some research I have been doing to learn more about the origins of our congregation back in the 1600s before we built this Meeting House, and when the group that became our Islington congregation had to worship in secret.

It was probably one of the most productive and well-rounded work weeks I have had since I started here. Which is exactly the point, isn't it?

AI did not replace my responsibility. It did not make moral choices about what I would say. It does not understand your needs, or feel the energy of this community, or even care whether this gathering resonates with you or not. We are still the ones who need to bring that. But it helped create something that serves us in a way that allows more room for what this congregation needs.

What we do matters, and so does how and why we do it. AI tools are part of our lives, and the question before us is the same question we have to ask about every other resource we have access to: How do we use it wisely, ethically, in ways that expand our humanity rather than diminish it?

Conclusion

Can we use artificial intelligence to serve human flourishing? I think we can. We are already seeing that we can harness its power for healing and for justice. But we cannot forget that the most important choices—the ones that give our lives meaning and direction—are not computational ones. They are human ones requiring our wisdom and courage to wrestle with.

We do not need to figure out what technology will become; we need to figure out who we will become. Will we let our tools reshape us in their image? Or will we shape our tools in ways that help us thrive as fully, gloriously, and imperfectly human?

We can meet these challenges with openness and careful discernment. We can embrace innovation while protecting the Sacred at the same time. We can use AI without being used by it, benefitting from machine intelligence at the same time we are cultivating authentic humanity.

But only if we choose that path. Only if we pay attention. Only if we keep asking: ‘What makes us human? What makes us ethical, and whole?’

Tell me, ‘what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

Algorithms cannot answer this for us. We can, and we must answer it again and again, in each moment we live, in every choice we make.

And our answer to this question—lived with intention, compassion, and courage—will be the legacy we leave for future generations.

This is the flame we’re called to tend. May we do it with integrity and love.

Blessed be.