These feats are awe-inspiring. As are the countless number of milestones and accomplishments each successive AI frontier model has racked up since ChatGPT was launched in 2022. But as we marvel at the machines, what gets crowded out are the humans. While acknowledging the amazing capacity of AI, we shouldn’t lose sight of the irreplaceable value of human-generated awe.
The triumphs of AI certainly qualify. But one of Keltner’s studies, which looked at 2,600 stories of awe across 26 countries, had a very revealing finding. “What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe?” he writes. “Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”
Keltner listed moral beauty as the first of his “eight wonders of life” that are everyday sources of awe. The others are collective movement, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, big ideas, and life and death. Technology can play a part in many of those, but they’re mostly deeply shaped by humans and human connection.
But what happens when a new technology, like AI, disrupts our sense of authentic community? To be sure, the ease with which our heads can be turned by machines long predates AI and has been with us as long as machines have. The term "technological sublime" was coined by the Harvard historian Perry Miller, who found that by the early nineteenth century "technological majesty" had joined "the starry heavens above and the moral law within to form a peculiarly American trinity of the Sublime.” In 1994, historian David Nye’s American Technological Sublime explored the impact that awe inspired by achievements like automated factories, the first canal systems, and the moon landing had on national identity. Nye notes how tech-inspired awe crowded out the human element. Writing about the awe-inspiring view from the new skyscrapers, he observed that it "divorced the observer from the sense of connection with others." From that height, the people below became "mere insects whose humanity had disappeared.”
Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein was addressing the students of Caltech—many of whom would no doubt go on to create awe-inspiring technology themselves—and gave them this charge: “Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors... in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.”
“Because we have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies,” he writes, “finding awe is easy if we just take a moment and wonder. All of us, no matter what our background, can find our own meaningful path to awe.
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