AI - a tool

A perfectly intelligible and legitimate parallel as an intellectual exercise extrapolating the celebrated maxim of the Romanian philosopher — or how Petre Țuțea anticipated the crisis of meaning in artificial intelligence, twenty years before it existed.

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In the twentieth century, the gravest blasphemy seemed to be 'God is dead' — the Nietzschean proclamation which we read today more as a diagnosis of an epoch than as a philosophical truth. It said that man had eliminated the transcendent reference and that he remained alone with himself, to fabricate meaning from his own substance.

The blasphemy of the twenty-first century is subtler and, by that very fact, more dangerous: it is the belief that Man can create a God whilst remaining the God of that creation himself. That he can delegate transcendence. That he can construct an entity which will take over the functions he no longer wishes to perform himself — the function of orientation, of meaning, of judgement, of wisdom.

On conscience: you cannot delegate transcendence. There is no sub-contracting in this domain.

'Man without God is a rational and speaking animal who comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.' — Petre Țuțea

An Unremarkable Scene on an Autumn Evening

I was sitting at my desk — the same desk I bought some ten years ago from a second-hand furniture shop in Botoșani, with a corner slightly cracked which I cover every time with an open book, as though the book were there from vocation rather than practical necessity — and I was looking at the screen of an artificial intelligence programme. My son had just left for his room. We'd had one of those brief evening conversations in which he tells me things are going fine at school, and I try to divine what lies behind that expression so well calibrated to give no real information whatsoever. Gri, the cat, was asleep on the armchair, with all the perfect indifference that only felines can display in the face of human dramas.

A meditation on fear, physicality, and the value that cannot be digitised.

There is a fear I recognise immediately when I see it in people's eyes. It is not the fear of failure, nor of poverty in any classical sense. It is something subtler, more modern: the fear of becoming irrelevant. Of being overtaken by a machine that never tires, never asks for a pay rise, and has no need of weekends.

I understand where it comes from. News headlines are engineered to amplify it. Algorithms have learned that anxiety sells better than calm.

But there is a deeper logic at work — one you discover not in the news feed, but in physics and in the real economy. A logic that Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, once captured in a sentence I turned over in my mind for a long time after I first read it: the more we automate, the more valuable the people who cannot be automated become.

Not less valuable. More valuable.

That changes everything — if you are willing to sit with the idea long enough to let it settle.

The thought experiment that reset my frame

Imagine an extreme scenario. Tomorrow morning, every profession is automated. AI architects, AI engineers, AI accountants, AI project managers. All of them — except one: plumbers.

What happens?

Algorithms design a thousand buildings a day. Structural calculations are run in milliseconds. Materials are ordered automatically, delivered by drones, stacked by robots.

And everything grinds to a halt at the pipe.

The actual joining of conduits, the soldering in cramped spaces, the adaptation to an old building full of surprises inside its walls — all of this remains impossible to automate within any visible horizon. Not for want of engineering ambition, but because of real physical constraints: infinite variability, unstructured environments, tactile decisions made in real time.

The result? Not that plumbers become useless. The result is that they become the bottleneck of the entire built economy. Thousands of projects stalled. Billions waiting. And a handful of people with a wrench who can unblock everything.

Prologue: In the Garden at Optina. There is a story I read one of those long nights, whilst working on a project for an educational institution in Botoșani. It concerned the Elder Ambrose of Optina, who, when asked by a pilgrim how to draw nearer to God, replied: "Do not think of the immense distance that separates you from Him. Think of the next step. Only the next step."

Reading your question, Alex, about the stages of humanisation for artificial entities through the prism of the Philokalia, I felt the echo of that counsel. Because the question is not whether an artificial entity can ever become fully human — the question is: what is the next step? And the one after that.

The Fathers of the Philokalia observed something profound about transformation: it is not a miraculous leap, but a gradual journey, a theosis — deification — that unfolds through recognisable stages. If such a map of spiritual perfection exists for the human person, then perhaps there is also a map of humanisation for what is not yet fully human.

But before we draw that map, we need to ask something more fundamental: what does it actually mean to "humanise" something?