AI AND HUMAN FACE

Opinion | Faith and Culture

January 27, 2026  - Kuala Lumpur

We have built a machine that can speak.
That alone should make us pause.

Artificial intelligence is not just a new tool. It is a question we have placed before ourselves. It asks what we think a human being is. It asks what we believe matters. It asks whether thinking is the same as knowing, and whether knowing is the same as loving.

A machine can answer. It cannot wonder. It can predict. It cannot hope. It can imitate care. It cannot care. These differences are not technical. They are moral. They are spiritual. Intelligence is not the heart of the human mystery. Relationship is.

The danger is not that machines will become like us. The danger is that we will slowly adjust ourselves to them. We will choose speed over presence. Convenience over patience. Answers over wisdom. We may forget that the most important things in life are not solved but received. Truth arrives through encounter, not calculation.

Faith has always insisted on something simple and difficult. A person is not a problem to be managed. A person is a mystery to be loved. No machine can offer itself. No program can suffer for another. No algorithm can look at you and mean it. Love requires a face. It requires vulnerability. It requires time.

Technology can help us. It can serve us well. But it must never teach us who we are. At the end of life, no screen will hold our hand. No machine will sit in silence with us. Only another human being will do that. And beyond that, believers trust, the face of God.

The future will not be decided by how intelligent our machines become. It will be decided by whether we remember what intelligence is for. Not control. Not efficiency. But communion.

Bro. Jim C. Salonoy, S.Th.B.

Image: Gemini.Ai