In a world where machines learn at speed, our character often learns at their pace. This essay explores what that means for attention, desire, and the slow work of becoming human.
An Orpheus Formation Essay · Steven McMillan
We live in a moment where machines don’t just compute — they learn. And every time they do, they also teach us something about ourselves.
The first time a chatbot finishes your sentence, it feels clever and uncanny. You ask for a paragraph or a prayer, and an unseen intelligence answers almost instantly. Its fluency can feel like companionship, its confidence like care. Yet the longer we use such systems, the more we sense that something deeper is happening. Every exchange teaches the machine about us — but it also teaches us how to speak, expect, and even desire.
Technology has always reflected its makers, but large language models do more: they imitate us in real time. They mirror our curiosity, impatience, and longing for recognition. Faith has always been a way of learning how to see — and perhaps the question of machines and character is also a question of sight. The question is no longer what these tools can do, but what kind of people we are becoming as we learn to rely on them.
Artificial intelligence rewards speed, certainty, and scale. It answers before we’ve even finished asking. In a culture that measures value by velocity, slowing down becomes a moral choice.
There is an old proverb: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Guarding the heart in an age of machines may mean guarding our attention — protecting the slow, human capacities on which wisdom depends.
The great moral question of artificial intelligence is not whether machines can think, but whether humans will still attend.
Attention is where imagination and compassion begin. Lose it, and even faith becomes noise.
Perhaps wisdom in the age of algorithms begins, as it always did, with the courage to pay attention.
Published by Orpheus Books — Formation in an Age of Acceleration.