If you understand what it means to be human, you can use AI to reduce the inhuman elements of modern work—those tasks fragmented across countless software applications. It may even be possible to use AI to make space for deeply human endeavours. But if you do not know what it means to be human, AI may dehumanize us further since we will place machine ends into human activity.

Since we have an immortal and rational soul, humans alone can do what only humans can do, namely, contemplate intelligibles such as truth, justice, God, and angels. AI can never contemplate intelligibles, because humans alone have rational souls (animus / nous).

Here I am distinguishing anima, what every living creature has, from animus, what humans alone have. Given this distinction, humans possess an immaterial animus or nous (the Greek equivalent) that can contemplate other immaterial objects, that is, intelligibles. Only what is by nature intelligible can contemplate what is by nature intelligible.

Given this basic distinction, we should ask a follow-up question: what is AI for?

What Machines Are For

The things AI is for are the things humans are not made to do. AI is particularly good at mechanical or machine-like activities: calculation, organizing, storing and accessing data, rearranging information, and analyzing and retrieving it at a large scale. In other words, AI excels at tasks that are burdensome for humans because they do not cultivate human excellence. You are not meant to look at 10,000 pieces of inventory to extract 27 similarities across product lines. You are not meant to comb through 10,000 documents to update the spelling of one word twenty-seven times. Such labours do not, under normal conditions, ennoble the soul nor foster virtue. But machines are made for them. A machine, traditionally, does what a windmill does: it grinds grain in a way and at a scale no human could manage, for a purpose proper to the machine.

Some things only machines can do, because machines have ends proper to them. Some things only humans can do, because humans have ends proper to them. It is particularly human to sit down and master a tradition through documentary study, through writing a book, monograph, or article, or through teaching and organizing knowledge.

There may be some overlap between human and machine capacities. For instance, AI can summarize sources, but it cannot shape the soul the way slow, attentive reading does. The difference, however, is this: uniquely human labour does not exist merely to order information. It has a double end. First, it shapes the soul. It makes you into the kind of person who can contemplate the virtue you are studying (prudence, justice, wisdom) and apply it to civic life. It perfects excellence in us, and it applies that excellence to life.

For that reason, there will always be something a human can do that a machine cannot. Human work not only orders the world outside us but also forms the person within us. 

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