As AI Gets Faster, How Can We Become Wiser?

Faith at the Frontier
Exploring AI, human agency, and the way of faith | September 14, 2026

Inner Frontier

I had a fantastic conversation with a colleague on Friday about AI, its accelerating capabilities, and all the anxiety surrounding it.

Somewhere in that conversation, something crystallized for me:

I'm less concerned about AI than I am about human beings who lack the emotional maturity and human skills to work well with one another — much less with increasingly powerful AI.

I am NOT unconcerned about AI risk. There are serious questions about safety, employment, power, truth, relationships, the environment, and what happens as these systems become increasingly capable.

But look at where most of our attention goes.

What model was released this week?

What can it do now?

How much faster is it?

What jobs can it perform?

What benchmark did it break?

How close are we to the next threshold?

We measure the machines constantly.

For the time being, there are still humans "in-the-loop" and humans "on-the-loop" wherever there is AI. They are exercising agency.

When it's all said and done, it won't be AI that blows up the world, it will be us.

For me this means that our focus is wrong.

Who is paying attention to us?

How did we grow our humanity this week?

How did we grow in emotional maturity?

How did we become better friends?

When did we pause and truly listen to another person?

Where did we step off the wheel of production long enough to sit with our own minds — unaugmented, unfinished, and frail?

Where were we simply present?

One of my favorite songs is written and performed by Sara Groves is called "Add to the Beauty," from the album of the same name released in 2005. The lyrics go:

"I want to add to the beauty,

to tell a better story

I want to shine the light

that's burning up inside."

And later:

"This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful..."

I keep coming back to that.

While machines become more capable, are we becoming more human?

If there's a way for us to "add to the beauty" of the world, it will come from the development of our humanity. This is at least one of the powerful dimensions of the incarnation of Jesus. God in Jesus, doesn't run from our humanity. God, in Jesus, runs towards it. Maybe we should too.

From the Frontier

Post-scale power. Human-scale people.

My mentor, church historian and futurist Leonard Sweet, has used the term post-scale to describe what happens when increasing power crosses a threshold and becomes something qualitatively different.

Think about the history of weapons.

Club. Spear. Bow. Gun. Missile. Atomic bomb.

At some point, we haven't simply built a better weapon. The scale of the power changes the nature of the thing. It creates possibilities — and moral questions — that didn't exist before.

AI may be approaching similar thresholds. In fact, I would argue it surpassed them a generation ago before we knew to watch or even what we were looking at.

An AI system that writes a competent email is one thing.

Systems capable of reasoning across enormous bodies of information, generating software, persuading people, conducting research, creating realistic media, and increasingly taking actions across other systems begin to represent something different.

But here is the part I think deserves far more of our attention:

Our technology can become post-scale. Human maturity cannot.

Wisdom still takes time.

Character still requires formation.

Trust still grows through relationship.

Discernment still asks us to pause, listen, examine ourselves, and admit that we might be wrong.

We may soon wield forms of technological power unlike anything human beings have held before.

That makes the slow work of becoming human more important, not less.

The Human Landscape

Fast makes right

Another AI conversation partner of mine, Donnie Keele III, recently put the culture of technology this way:

“You've heard of might makes right? In tech, it's… fast makes right. The faster it is, the righter it is.”

That line has stayed with me.

Because human beings don't work that way.

You cannot become twice as wise by thinking twice as fast.

You cannot speed-run grief.

There is no shortcut to forgiveness.

Friendship takes time.

Trust takes time.

Discernment takes time.

Prayer takes time.

Love takes time.

Some of the greatest powers available to human beings are found in something our technological culture increasingly treats as inefficiency:

The pause.

And that makes new research about young people and AI especially important.

A machine that keeps your confidence

RELATE 2026, a new international study from Young Life, surveyed more than 7,000 teenagers and young adults in eleven countries.

Close relationships declined from an average of 5.3 per person in 2024 to 4.4 in 2026. More than one-third of respondents said they have an AI companion. Among those users, 60 percent said they were more comfortable confiding in the AI than in some friends or family members.

The study also found that 41 percent of the full sample considered AI reliable for spiritual questions.

Those numbers should get the church's attention.

But I wonder if we're tempted to ask the wrong question.

Why are young people trusting machines?

Turn the question around:

What are machines providing that young people aren't reliably receiving from us?

Confidentiality was the leading factor in building trust. Four in ten young people surveyed were not confident they had an adult who truly listened.

But here's another finding we shouldn't miss.

The percentage wanting face-to-face connection increased from 54 to 64 percent.

Young people haven't stopped wanting people.

They may be telling us something about the kind of people they need.

Signals from the Frontier

Children and companion AI. California enacted a child-safety package requiring crisis protocols, parental controls, independent audits, and annual risk assessments for companion chatbots used by children. The policy details will be debated, but the moral claim beneath them matters: children are not simply smaller consumers, and emotional persuasion is not simply another product feature.

AI and the dignity of work. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' 2026 Labor Day statement calls for worker participation, transparency, retraining, and protection of good jobs as AI reshapes work. It names de-skilling, surveillance, hidden low-wage labor, and inequality.

Again, the human question sits underneath the technological one:

Who has agency? Who benefits? Who bears the cost?

A Faithful Lens

The power of the pause

Christian faith has something important to say to a culture in which fast increasingly feels synonymous with good.

Our faith is filled with pauses.

Sabbath.

Silence.

Waiting.

Prayer.

Listening.

Forty years in a wilderness.

Forty days in a desert.

Three days between cross and empty tomb.

The Christian story doesn't treat waiting as wasted time.

Sometimes the pause is precisely where transformation happens.

And perhaps that is one of the gifts Christian communities can offer in an age of accelerating AI.

Human-speed spaces.

Places where nobody is optimizing anything.

Places where attention isn't divided.

Places where people can tell the truth without immediately being corrected.

Places where questions don't require instant answers.

Places where silence isn't awkward.

Places where another human being is worth our time.

AI can help us think faster.

But faster thinking is not the same thing as wisdom.

Wisdom asks us to stop.

To notice.

To listen.

To consider another person's experience.

To examine our motives.

To recognize when we might be wrong.

To remain with questions whose answers cannot be generated in seconds.

Perhaps the human pause isn't a weakness in an age of machine speed.

Perhaps it is one of our great powers.

AI's Inheritance Is Human

There is another reason I care so much about our formation as AI develops.

AI didn't arrive from somewhere else.

Its genesis is human.

Human beings created the mathematics and computer science beneath it. Human beings created the languages on which large language models depend. Human beings wrote the books, articles, arguments, stories, poems, prayers, code, and countless other texts from which these systems learned patterns.

That inheritance contains extraordinary beauty.

It also contains extraordinary brokenness.

Our compassion and our cruelty.

Our wisdom and our foolishness.

Our generosity and our greed.

Our truth and our lies.

That is part of what fascinates me about AI.

I love working with these systems. I don't want AI to make human beings less necessary. I am interested in AI because I believe it can help human beings become more capable of doing what is ours to do.

But augmentation cuts in every direction.

AI can augment wisdom. It can augment foolishness.

It can extend generosity. It can extend greed.

It can support creativity. It can support manipulation.

It can help us listen.

It can also give us another reason never to listen to anyone at all.

Post-scale tools remain in the hands of human-scale people.

The more capable our machines become, the more important human maturity becomes.

From Tool to Relationship to Authority

A newly published study in the journal Religions examined 65 publications and 30 documented cases involving AI and contemporary Buddhist life. Its most helpful insight extends beyond Buddhism: the religious significance of an AI system depends partly on the role people and institutions permit it to occupy.

The researchers distinguish among three roles.

Instrumental AI performs tasks.

Relational AI becomes a companion or guide.

Religiously authoritative AI interprets teachings or offers spiritual direction.

Each move requires greater human judgment and accountability.

That distinction matters for Christian communities.

A chatbot doesn't become spiritually wise because it sounds pastoral.

Fluency can simulate wisdom.

Familiarity can simulate relationship.

Confidence can simulate authority.

AI can assemble beautiful language about grace. It cannot sit beside a hospital bed and share another person's grief.

It can generate a prayer. It cannot become part of a gathered body praying together.

It can imitate patient attention.

And perhaps the fact that a machine can do that so convincingly should make us ask how patiently we listen.

A Hopeful Practice

Practice human speed

This week, try something intentionally inefficient.

Spend twenty minutes with another person without looking at your phone.

Ask a question you genuinely want to hear them answer.

Don't fix.

Don't correct.

Don't tell your version of their story.

Don't prepare your response while they're still speaking.

Listen.

Or spend twenty minutes alone.

No AI.

No podcast.

No playlist.

No television.

No notifications.

Don't produce anything.

Sit with your own unaugmented mind.

Notice what happens.

Notice the impulse to fill the silence.

Notice what appears when you don't.

Then ask:

What becomes possible when I stop trying to make this moment productive?

We need AI literacy.

We need thoughtful policies.

We need ethical safeguards.

We need technical understanding.

But perhaps we also need something much older.

We need to practice being human.

Around the Table

Other religious traditions are wrestling with related questions.

The Buddhist study suggests that religious communities help decide what roles machines are permitted to occupy. A proposed Islamic AI Development and Ethics Council similarly argues that AI should support human reasoning while religious texts and rulings remain subject to scholarly oversight.

Our traditions differ, but an important shared insight emerges:

Technical capability does not create spiritual authority.

Human communities still have choices to make.

Those choices require wisdom.

And wisdom requires formation.

An AI Concept to Know

Post-scale

Church historian and futurist Leonard Sweet has used post-scale to describe the point at which increasing power produces a qualitative change rather than simply a quantitative one.

The question changes from:

How much more powerful is this?

to:

Has this increase in power changed what this thing is capable of doing — and therefore what it means for human life?

That is an increasingly important question for AI.

And it carries a companion question:

Is our wisdom growing alongside our power?

Worth Your Attention

RELATE 2026 — Young Life. More than 7,000 teenagers and young adults across eleven countries offer an important glimpse into relationships, trust, loneliness, faith, and AI companionship.

The Waymo Effect — Daniel Hook. Hook names “decollaboration”: the quiet loss of disagreement, serendipity, and productive human friction when AI becomes the easier intellectual partner.

Counting the Ecological Cost of AI. A September 17 webinar from the World Council of Churches and Canadian Council of Churches will examine data centers, water, energy, critical minerals, community consent, and possible church advocacy.

Labor Day Statement 2026 — USCCB. A helpful Christian contribution to questions of worker agency, surveillance, inequality, retraining, and the hidden human labor supporting AI systems.

A Word for the Way

“You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”

— James 1:19, NLT

Machines are learning to speak with astonishing speed.

Maybe one of the faithful tasks before us is learning again to listen.

To pause.

To attend.

To become people worthy of another person's trust.

AI will keep getting faster.

It will become more capable.

Some of those capabilities may become post-scale.

But perhaps the question that matters most isn't only:

What did AI become capable of this week?

Let's ask another question too:

How did we grow our humanity this week?

Where did we listen?

Where did we become wiser?

Where did we become better friends?

Where did we choose presence over production?

Where did we practice the slow work of becoming people capable of carrying the extraordinary power now being placed in human hands?

Sara Groves gave us a lovely way to say it twenty years ago.

Where did we add to the beauty?

Sources

1. RELATE 2026. Young Life international youth study and public summary, accessed September 2026.

2. “Global study finds a third of young people have an AI companion.” Christian Daily International, September 11, 2026.

3. Wanje Gil and Chungwhan Sung, “From Instrument to Religious Authority,” Religions, September 2026.

4. California child-safety chatbot and social-media laws, Office of the Governor of California, September 10, 2026.

5. “Labor Day Statement 2026,” U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, September 7, 2026.

6. “Who Will Shape the Intelligence of Tomorrow,” Islamic Economy Academy, September 2, 2026.

7. Daniel Hook, “The Waymo Effect,” Research Agenda, September 7, 2026.

8. “Counting the Ecological Cost of AI,” World Council of Churches, September 17, 2026.

9. Leonard Sweet, “Outstorming Christianity's Perfect Storm,” in The Church of the Perfect Storm, 2008.

10. Sara Groves, “Add to the Beauty,” Add to the Beauty, 2005.

#AITransparency

Faith at the Frontier is directed, curated, and edited by Nathan Swenson-Reinhold, with research and drafting assistance from ChatGPT (Geri) and ManusAI (Archie). Nathan retains responsibility for the final content, judgments, and conclusions. The image was created using ChatGPT.