What Is A Human For?
"It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." —Wendell Berry
Neither gods nor machines.
For most of modern history, we've answered "what is a human for?" with a job description—our worth measured by what we can do, not how we should be. As machines absorb the doing, that answer is vanishing. If we don't replace it, the machines will answer for us by default.
What Is a Human For? is a talk I gave to a political theology book club, alongside four Palladium essays circling the question. It acknowledges and refuses the answers given by Silicon Valley and The Vatican. The former wants the human without limitation—live forever, merge with the machine, become gods—while quietly severed from the sacred it claims to channel. The latter wants us to know our place—limitation as the condition for grace—while using that limitation to abdicate responsibility for what gets built. Opposite directions, identical move: one hands the sacred to the machine, the other hands responsibility to God. Both give away the one thing only we can do.
The third path isn't a position but a capacity. Underneath every framework we reach for—science, religion, the people we trust—is the question of how we know what's true at all. The answer isn't another framework. It's wisdom: the internal algorithm that lets us arrive at truth by any path without getting trapped in the box that path came in. Power without that kind of authority is a recipe for disaster—and it's the difference between building technology as a transmission of the sacred and building it as a projection of insecurity dressed up as the sacred.
None of this promises certainty about the future. It promises something better: that if we cultivate the wisdom to know the difference, we can build the ground a good future grows from—and trust ourselves to be the ones who lay it.