The human in the age of AI
What is happening to humans in the age of AI?
How can extraordinary machine capability contribute to extraordinary human possibility?
The deeper thread
These questions didn’t begin with AI.
“The world needs more of YOU. Especially during this time of transformation.”
I have spent much of my life noticing the particular significance of individual human beings. Across very different kinds of work, my concern has been the same: helping people recognize what is particularly theirs, find greater clarity and alignment among what they believe, value, practice, and choose, and become more able to bring their full selves into the world.
Why now
“How do we become more human, rather than less, in the age of AI?”
AI can dramatically extend human agency… but it can also diminish our human capacities like cognition, skills, and even cause our values to drift.
Current inquiry
How are humans changing as we live and work with increasingly capable AI?
What happens to agency, judgment, attention, creativity, identity, relationship, and formation?
What should humans continue to know, practice, judge, create, choose, and do—even when machines can do more for us?
What helps humans remain centered amid extraordinary technological change?
What does AI reveal about humanity that we may not have been able to see before?
What are the best ways for human and machine intelligence to work together?
The governing aspiration
Becoming more human, more in control of who we are at a time when technology is changing our world in ways we don’t fully understand.
Where the inquiry takes form
Four ways of asking the same question in different settings.
Research
Understanding human experience and formation within AI-shaped environments.
Building
Translating these ideas into practices and tools, including through FaithWise and Core Compass.
Teaching & Convening
Settings in which educators, leaders, technologists, students, and communities wrestle with these questions themselves.
Collaborating
Bringing many forms of knowledge together—no single discipline can answer what this transformation means for human beings.
Marian
I did not become interested in humans because I became interested in AI.
My inquiry grows out of decades spent close to human beings—as a pastor and hospice chaplain, in pluralism and human dignity work, in bridge-building across deep difference, in spiritual formation, research, education, and now technology. AI is a new environment for a much older human question.
- Currently
- Founder, FaithWise.AI · Co-Director, AI Initiative, Neurospirituality Lab, Mass General Brigham
- Created
- The Personal Moral Compass and the Core Compass family of practices and tools
The turn toward you
What is particularly yours?
First, as a person
What matters most to you?
Where are you most fully yourself?
Then, in the age of AI
What do you want technology to amplify?
What should remain yours?
What is forming you now—and who are you becoming through the ways you use technology?
Recognize what is particularly yours, and participate intentionally in who you are becoming.
Connect
Interested in exploring these questions together?
Research, speaking, convening, collaboration, or simply a conversation.