By Lily Rockefeller
As we prepare for the upcoming Artificial Intelligence and Our Spiritual Imagination conference, held virtually October 17-18, we invited our speakers to sit with the same two questions to showcase the variety of perspectives, inquiries, and ways of knowing that will shape our conversations at the conference this fall.
In this two-part blog series, we’ll share responses from six of our speakers. This week, we’re pleased to feature Samar Younes, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, and Tim Leberecht.
Samar, born in Beirut, is an artist-theorist and ancestral futurist working through craft, ritual, and emergent technologies as her living materials. Yolanda is a poet, activist, and professor of English Education at Columbia Teachers College, whose work focuses on racial literary and culturally responsive education. Tim is an author and entrepreneur whose work brings together aesthetics, philosophy, culture, and business, asking what it means to be human in an age of AI.
What do you think AI is revealing about what it means to be human—and what, if anything, does it challenge us to reconsider about our spiritual lives?
Samar Younes: AI reveals less about humans than about the environments we build and then forget we built. The machine’s pull toward the probable, frictionless and already-said did not begin with AI. We built cultures that reward those conditions, then trained machines on their sediment. Now we are living inside the feedback loop.
For me, that is a spiritual question: What happens to our capacity for doubt, sensing, wandering and relation, when certainty is always on offer? Perhaps the challenge is not preserving some essence of being human from the machine, but noticing where we have already domesticated ourselves, and recovering ways of knowing that require context, provenance, embodiment, and consequence.
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz: I think AI is revealing how much we need to return to our humanity through the simple acts of touch, being present with one another in moments of joy and pain, and understanding that it is okay to have boundaries. As AI becomes more capable of mimicking what appears to be human, it calls us to deepen our criticality and ask questions like: Do we really need to create this image? What can be created from our own thoughts and imagination?
Spiritually, I think AI challenges us to reconsider our relationship to knowing and to ask: What is sacred about being human? I hope it prompts us to slow down and remember that we do not have to know everything or have an immediate answer. There is something deeply spiritual about not knowing and relying on spiritual forces beyond ourselves for answers, acceptance, and understanding.
Tim Leberecht: AI is the Great Humbling. It is reminding us that we are not the center of the universe; that we are one of many species, an interconnected part of something greater than the sum of all parts. Ironically, peak rationality, peak logic—AI—is ushering in a new era of Romanticism, similar to what we saw in response to the Enlightenment: a longing for nature, for the irrational and ecstatic, for the illegible, the “unspeakable world,” for the mystical and the divine.
I find this encouraging—and a significant opportunity to use AI to reawaken and expand our spiritual imagination and, consequently, our moral imagination. The two are directly related (and this is where imagination becomes political): If we can imagine that there is always another, deeper world—the quintessential spiritual and Romantic vision—then we can also imagine Otherness and engage with it more meaningfully and humanely. So perhaps AI, as the Great Humbling, is giving us access to what our fellow conference speaker Bayo Akomolafe calls the “magical Otherwise.”
It is also prompting us (pun intended) to realize that we have placed too much emphasis on “intelligence”—even creating semantic monsters such as “relational” or “spiritual intelligence”—as the primary metric of value, when, in fact, our relationship to the world—and to a higher power, faith, God, or a metaphysical realm—is shaped by so many other qualities. We must resist allowing intelligence to colonize every aspect of our humanity, of life.
As AI becomes increasingly woven into everyday life, what is one practice, question, or way of seeing that you believe can help us remain connected to our deeper humanity?
Samar Younes: Handle the tool instead of obeying it. A machine trained on the probable will always offer you the center. I work its behavior as material, kneading it through dissonance, mutation, absurdity, and play, letting meaning emerge from the encounter rather than arriving at it by resolution, since premature coherence is its own form of domestication.
Before accepting any output I ask: Whose knowing was thinned to produce this, and what would it mean to put it back? Synthetic intelligence becomes one material among many, in call and response with ancestral, ecological, artisanal, and embodied ways of knowing, none sovereign. This is what I call Quantum Craft: staying capable of doubt, relation and wandering when the system is designed to make those unnecessary.
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz: With this question, I return to [my work on] Archeology of Self as a continual practice of excavating who we are, what we carry, and who we are becoming. The question I ask myself and prompt others to consider is: Who am I becoming as I use this technology? I hope we return to the practice of appreciating breath, needing to reflect, journal, pray, listen, and remain in a full-presence relationship with ourselves and with other people.
Tim Leberecht: I recently attended a My Chemical Romance concert with my teenaged daughter, and I was blown away by the dedication of the fans, the “lore,” and the renaissance of the emo genre across generations. More broadly, I am observing a profound desire for extraordinary experiences—for collective effervescence, shared emotional journeys that allow us to feel our bonds more intimately, to experience awe and wonder, to feel alive.
Whether it is a sporting event, a psychedelic retreat, a techno rave, a rock concert, a silent dinner, a listening bar, or an immersive business festival like ours, in-person gatherings—and the rituals associated with them—offer us the “thickness” that is increasingly absent from everyday life, as AI optimizes and “thins” more and more aspects of our humanity.
Samar, Yolanda, and Tim join several leading speakers for the Artificial Intelligence and Our Spiritual Imagination virtual conference on October 17 and 18. Learn More & Register
