It was surely one of the most revealing cultural moments of the decade so far. On his podcast, Interesting Times, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asks PayPal cofounder, tech billionaire, and Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel about the future:
Douthat: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”
Thiel: “Er . . .”
Douthat: “You’re hesitating. Yes . . . ?”
Thiel: “I dunno . . . I would . . . I would . . . erm . . .”
Douthat: “This is a long hesitation . . . Should the human race survive?”
Thiel: “Er . . . yes, but . . .”
Their exchange is a canary in the coal mine. Something has changed. We used to leave forecasts of the AI apocalypse to shadowy characters lurking in the darker corners of 4chan and Reddit, but not anymore. In the interview, Thiel waxes eloquent on his transhumanist aspirations. Thiel’s vision, and alongside other recent interventions the AI 2027 project and Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, he casually forecasts the end—or at least the radical transformation—of humanity as we know it. The AI apocalypse is becoming mainstream.
But a more immediate and revealing AI apocalypse confronts us. The word “apocalypse,” after all, doesn’t originally mean “catastrophe” or “annihilation.” Apokalypsis is Greek for “unveiling.” This AI apocalypse is an exposé, revealing something previously obscure or covered over.
More than any other technology in memory, Generative AI (which I’ll simply call AI in this article) is making us face up to uncomfortable or even disturbing truths about ourselves, and it’s opening a rare and precious space in which we can ask fundamental and pressing questions about who we are, where we find value, and what the good life looks like. //
What AI is revealing in this case is the importance of process, not just of product, and the importance not only of what work we do but of what our work does to us.
AI wonderfully reduces the friction of work: the grunt, the slow bits, the obstacles. But it also reveals to us how gravely we misunderstand this friction. We most often see friction as a nuisance, something to be optimized away in favor of greater productivity. After all, is it really so dangerous if AI outsources drudgery?
But AI presents us with a vision of almost infinite productivity and almost zero friction, and in this way it acts like a living thought experiment to help us see something that was hiding in plain sight all along: Friction is a gym for the soul. The awkward conversation, the blank page, the child who won’t sleep when we have a report to write––these aren’t roadblocks to our growth; they’re the highway to wisdom and maturity, to being the sort of people who can deal with friction in life with resilience and grace. Without it, we remain weak and small, however impressive our productivity.
We can have too much friction; we knew that already. But AI, perhaps for the first time, shows us we can also have too little. Without friction, we can never become “the sort of person who . . .”
In this way, AI can drag us toward a more biblical view of work. The God of the Bible cares not only about outcomes but also about processes, not only about what we human beings do but also about who we’re becoming as we do it. God seeks out David for being a man after his own heart, not for his potential as a great military commander or king (1 Sam. 13:14).
And why does God whittle down Gideon’s troops to a paltry 300 before attacking the Midianites (Judg. 7)? Because it’s not just about the victory. God intentionally introduces friction by reducing the army to reshape the character of his people, making them “the sort of people who” rely on God, not on themselves (see v. 2).
By short-circuiting the process to focus only on the product, AI exposes our obsession with outcomes and opens up a space in which we can reflect on what we miss when we focus only on what we do, not on who we’re becoming.
