Different religious and cultural traditions interpret the mystery of life and death in different ways. Yet in all of them, the sacredness of this mystery is what opens up the ultimate questions human beings are called to face: the meaning of one’s life and the possibility of living our humanity to the fullest.
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be changing the horizon within which we confront these questions of meaning. The danger is that we may begin to adapt ourselves to function like machines—devices that should remain tools, not become the very purpose of existence.
From medical AI to ghostbots, the roles played by artificial intelligence differ profoundly. AI is not an abstract, uniform entity but a range of technological systems serving distinct functions. In healthcare, AI can offer real support to doctors and patients. Ghostbots, by contrast, seek to help people process grief, an experience often seen as purely negative—emotional and moral suffering. The risk is that we label what is “good” or “bad” for human beings merely on the basis of symptoms, instead of considering the role such experiences play in the totality of a person’s life, and in their journey of inner growth.
What are we truly afraid of when we try to avoid what belongs to our nature? According to which criteria do we distinguish between what fosters our inner growth and what, instead, helps us escape the question of meaning—shielding us from the suffering and from the biological and existential limitations that shape human life?
The problem is not technological progress itself, but the purposes for which we direct it: our difficulty in discerning what genuinely supports life in a constructive way from what distances us from questions of meaning, from conscious action, and from the very challenges through which we can live fully.
Thus, the real issue is not simply the supposed freedom to live forever or to choose an AI-generated friend. It is to ask which question of meaning such efforts attempt to answer—or which fear they conceal. How would we inhabit an endless life? What kinds of relationships would we form? What do we fear in refusals and disappointments?
The risk is that we conform ourselves to technologies which, even while enhancing aspects of reality, encourage us to evade the question of meaning—the only question that truly makes us human.
