Yesterday I brought the sacrament and prayer to an older member of my faith community who fell and broke her knee. You see, I am the called leader of my congregation and I have personal relationships with each one of our members. I listen to their joys, their sufferings, their pains, and their hopes for themselves and their loved ones. And I respond by sharing my own joys, sufferings, pains, and hopes. We live together in real-life relationships. We are present for each other. It isn’t perfect. Sometimes I forget to call someone or visit someone. But I always get around to it. AI is incapable of doing any of this.

I am also an academic. I teach and I write academic analysis based on the broad swath of history and literature I have read over my lifetime. But my teaching also includes anecdotes of my personal experiences as a faith-community leader and a human being. These anecdotes draw my students into the academic conversation because they can relate to my human experience. AI is incapable of doing any of this. Why would we ever expect it to?

Call me old-fashioned. I like to read books that are printed on pages and bound between covers. There’s something humanly present about holding a book in your hands and turning pages while you read. It’s not just another electronic blog post (lol like this one!). It’s not just another pdf document in your to-read folder. There’s something about holding a book in your hands and feeling a very real connection with a human being who wrote it. AI is incapable of doing any of this.

AI is a cheap and unrewarding, impersonal and all around crappy experience when it comes to actually working through the process of learning how to do something — learning how to read and write, learning how to improve your reading and writing, learning multiple ways to solve a math problem, learning the limitless nuances of language. AI is incapable of doing any of this.

AI can’t do what I do.