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“Who will we become with AI?” That is the question that informed a March 2025 colloquium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, for which I originally wrote these notes.¹ 

The “becoming” in this guiding question seems to orient a certain human trajectory, as though to ask, “Who will humanity be going forward, traveling with AI?” I want to speak to this very personally because I, myself, travel with AI in a literal sense. And, indeed, I speak to it. I use AI on my commute to work—I write while driving using the Voice Typing function of Google’s Gboard app on my Samsung Android phone. So I will ask, “Who will I become with AI?” We'll see if the answer to that question reflects a more general answer that will allow us to bring something back to the original question.

I started Voice Typing as an attempt to continue my writing practice while needing to commute over fifty kilometres twice a day between my home and my place of employment. It is my joy to serve as Director of Communications and Public Engagement, and also as a Scholar-in-Residence, at Regent College. As many readers will know, Regent is located at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, North America's second-most congested city. On an average day, my commute takes a little over an hour each way—unless there's been an accident, in which case it can take almost any amount of time. One reaches an impasse and is forced either to wait or to take the long way around. 

In some respects, this situation represents for me the latest of a long series of detours. I have been traveling on a path about which I am forming more and more serious doubts, and AI is part of that, as I will explain. You see, as a young person, I dreamed of becoming a musician, and indeed, I am a musician—a guitarist. It was through my work as a musician that I became interested in administration, first as a concert promoter, and later through many professional roles, including as the manager of a professional orchestra. Over the years, I became increasingly serious about songwriting, which led to an interest in poetry written for the page as well. That is how I became a writer. I took an interest in poetry through my interest in songwriting, and later studied poetry at university, which is where I learned to write as a scholar, and even taught creative writing for a time. 

I came to AI along the same route: through Voice Typing, which allows me to continue my writing practice (including drafting parts of this very article), and through my detours, which has tied my writing to scholarship, poetry, and songwriting, for all of which I now use Voice Typing. And I am very grateful for all of that, just as I am grateful for the employment that also supports this creative and intellectual work. But I want to note a certain contradiction: the means of supporting my work is also the biggest obstacle to continuing my work. I would not have turned to Voice Typing to continue my writing if my writing had not been threatened by my commute. I would not have chosen the commute if I could afford to live closer to Vancouver, which is suffering from a decades-long housing crisis. And, in fact, if I had been able to support a family as a musician, I may not have chosen to work in concert promotions, administration, or academia. 

Each of these things has been an incredible blessing, and I have felt a real sense of vocation in each. Yet it remains true that apart from my own sense of direction, by accident, at every stage of my career I have reached an impasse and was forced either to wait or to take the long way around. Both strategies have risks. And I am still trying to get somewhere—at any given time, from work to home, or back—and to become someone: the person God has called me to be, doing the work God has called me to do. But what, exactly, are the risks? Where do the detours lead, and who am I becoming along the way? 

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that all arts and inquiries seek a good end:  

Every art and every kind of inquiry, and likewise every act and purpose, seems to aim at some good: and so it has been well said that the good is that at which everything aims. But a difference is observable among these aims or ends. What is aimed at is sometimes the exercise of a faculty, sometimes a certain result beyond that exercise. And where there is an end beyond the act, there the result is better than the exercise of the faculty.²

If writing is the exercise of a faculty—namely, the faculty to think in language—it is perhaps not entirely clear whether it should be considered an end in itself, or a means to an end. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on these arguments, which have occasioned a tremendous philosophical literature over the centuries. I will focus on the question of means and ends as concerns writing and AI.

There is some ambiguity about the relationship between human flourishing and work. Now, Aristotle will argue that the good of a person is happiness, which is the conventional English translation of the Greek word eudaimonia, which literally means “well-being.” The roots of our English word “happiness,” in contrast, refer not to an internal state of being, but to good luck, favourable circumstances. Well-being seems to require favourable circumstances: Aristotle says of eudaimonia that “a happy man is ‘one who exercises his faculties in accordance with perfect excellence, being duly furnished with external goods, not for any chance time, but for a full term of years […] and who shall continue to live so, and shall die as he lived,’ since the future is veiled to us, but happiness we take to be the end and in all ways perfectly final and complete.”³

For Aristotle, happiness “will be the exercise of the highest virtue”: reason, whose highest activity is philosophical speculation. Although Aristotle raises but does not settle the question of whether this virtuous faculty is “itself divine, or only the divinest part of us,” he asserts that exercising the faculty of reason, in its proper excellence, will be perfect happiness.

Exercising a faculty sounds like a kind of work, but for Aristotle, this work is leisurely, in contrast with practical occupations. So, if it is work, it is not hard work. And it is divine, and seems to draw us somehow beyond our humanity; “the exercise of reason will be the complete happiness of man” exercising some divine element “superior to our compound human nature.”  For Aristotle, this will be the life of a human being’s “true self.”⁴ Human flourishing, but perhaps also divine flourishing, in a way.

So, Aristotle’s notion of human flourishing depends on freedom from practical occupations. He brings this stance not only to the question of the flourishing of an individual, but to that of humanity in general. Aristotle will say that “no one supposes that a slave can participate in happiness.”⁵ In another text, the Politics, Aristotle says that humanity will need slaves until, for example, looms weave by themselves.⁶ Aristotle’s stance is that in order to allow the best people to exercise their best capacities, the least good people will have to do the least good work that remains necessary.

Of course, in the twentieth century, humans invented looms that literally do weave by themselves. (In fact, the history of the development of the mechanical loom and the earliest computers is fascinatingly interconnected.) But it must be observed that humanity still has slavery and exploitation. And the word “robot” has its etymological roots in the Czech word for “servitude.” I would suggest that we should definitely not suppose, as Aristotle seems to at times, that those who have the most capacity to think generally find themselves with the most freedom to think.

As a tool, AI is intended, at least in part, to help liberate humanity from toilsome work to pursue a more complete freedom. But since writing could appear to have an obscure relationship to thinking, there remains an ambiguity as to whether writing, as thinking, is what we are being liberated to, or liberated from. So let’s turn to the relationship between writing and eudaimonia.

The French literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes touches on eudaimonia in at least two places. In the first, he identifies a move in 1960s and ’70s literary theory and criticism “From Work to Text.” In his 1971 essay by that name,⁷ Barthes claims that “the theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.”⁸ The central idea of the essay is to announce and describe a paradigm shift from the conception of the field of literature as grounded in the work—a finished object representing the will, genius, and personality of an individual author—to the Text, a “network” of linguistic and intelligible connections that one reads not as a faithful reproducer, but as a co-creator alongside the writer.

Barthes writes that the Text is “not to be thought of as an object that can be computed.”⁹ In other words, it is not a matter of identifying which literary productions exhibit the features of “the work” and which exhibit those of “Text.” Instead, Text is a “methodological field”—it is a particular approach to literature, not necessarily a kind of writing that could be understood as such within the old paradigm. Indeed, the Text destabilizes genre and classification; it is precisely its capacity to cut across ancient divisions (such as between poetry and prose, criticism and memoir, or, more radically, fiction and non-fiction) that constitutes the function of Text.

Text represents inexhaustible play without closure. Barthes does not mean that it is endlessly playful; he is using the word “play” more like engineers do, referring to inefficient but necessary free movement between parts in a mechanism. This is, for Barthes, an aspect of how structuralist linguistics transforms literary study, by demonstrating the limits of an author's control over their meanings, which changes the locus of aesthetic value in literature.

Far from the work of an individual genius, Barthes writes that “the Text is plural.”¹⁰ It is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes,”¹¹ it is “multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives.”¹² This intertextuality does not result from the Text merely having many “sources” or “influences” that provide an author with material, but instead represents language as a common possession that must always exceed the intentions of the author.

For Barthes, an understanding of literature that concentrates on “the work” is bound up in a myth of “filiation,” which situates the author as father. He ties this specifically to the legal tradition of an author’s copyright ownership over their work. He describes this as an artifact of an obsolete “literary morality.”¹³ Unlike the work, which is understood as the “object of a consumption,” the Text is an “activity, production, practice.”¹⁴ In other words, Text is a dynamic process that involves the writer, the reader, and the critic, and that takes place within literature and language as such. 

Barthes concludes by locating the larger horizon for the Text not within meaning but within pleasure. In his 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes identifies eudaimonia as the ultimate value of literature.¹⁵ His concern is to announce a critical ethics of literature which can treat literature as an end in itself but at the same time see literature as continuous with philosophical inquiry, because language is inextricable from thought. While a Marxist literary theory might foreground the role of literature in ideological critique, ultimately in service of the proletarian revolution, or a Freudian theory might aim at a symptomology of the text, ultimately in service of mental health as management of unconscious psychological drives, eudaimonia here might represent a distinctively structuralist approach to meaning.

When Barthes claims that “the theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing,” this is because for him, theory does not have a kind of authority that other kinds of writing do not have. There is no logical, methodological, or epistemic authority that could distinguish one kind of writing from another; writing is simply writing. So, while a piece of writing understood as a “work” could be understood in an academic frame of reference, where a professor or critic could pronounce judgement on the work, writing understood as Text is not subject to the same dynamic. This is the end (both in the sense of termination and in the sense of fulfillment) of philosophy’s authority over literature. This is because for Barthes, philosophy is literature, and literature, then, must be a kind of philosophy. 

Barthes also wrote the famous 1967 essay “Death of the Author.”¹⁶ Under Barthes’s influence, academic literary criticism today largely understands the author not as an authority over their text but as the producer of their text. The author, in other words, does not simply get to decide what their text means—their intentions are not an authoritative guide to the meaning of a piece of writing. The author, like every other person, is driven and motivated by various things, many of which are unseen. Their writing is an effect, but its cause is not the author, because the author is an effect of other causes, be they psychological, economic, ideological, or other forces. The author speaks neither in their text nor through their text, but larger forces speak through the author. 

As computer code, AI is a kind of writing. It has authors, and with certain careful qualifications, its author could be said to be humanity in general, in that the textual materials that Large Language Models are trained on are inherently anonymous and anonymizing. If we consider AI alongside a view of the author as a producer of a text, not an authority over it, we start to see that AI has more in common with the author than we might have imagined (and, indeed, more than we might feel comfortable with). Like an author, AI is an effect of various causes. When I speak to it, I am a force acting on it, just as other forces have acted on me. In a classical sense, AI cannot be said to be responsible for the text it produces because if the inputs had been different, the outcome would be different. But the same could be said of me: if the “inputs” that make me who I am had been different, both I and my writing would be different. In this model, then, writing could be said to be something that happens to us, as if by accident.

In the light of all this, there is some tension in Barthes’s notion of the practice of a writer. While it promises freedom from the kind of authority imagined by the paradigm that treated the product of writing as a “work,” it sets up another, more powerful authority: that of the material forces that act on the writer. The meaning an author may believe themselves to intend is overshadowed by the production of many meanings that are determined by other forces that are prior to the author’s consciousness (such as ideological or psychological forces). Where this coincides with Aristotle is that if freedom from practical toil is necessary to the exercise of our highest faculty, it begins to appear as though the production of leisure and the leisure of production form one interminable, inexhaustible process. Liberation for liberation’s sake; literature for literature’s sake; production for production’s sake. And so the notion of meaning as a result of material production subsumes that of meaning as a product of authorial intention. And the practice of writing that this describes takes on the character of a risk, in the sense that is not finally traceable back to a responsible person, but to chaotic, impersonal forces. Neither can it lead to anywhere else but the extension of the forces that produced it (namely, as above, psychological, economic, ideological, etc.). And yet this process most definitely is exhaustible. 

This returns us to AI. By Voice Typing while driving, I am able to continue a kind of writing practice. But driving is not without risks, and thinking about other things while driving exacerbates them. Even apart from direct risks to my own life and the lives of the drivers and passengers around me, there is the larger-scale risk of driving and energy consumption causing irreparable harm to all life on earth through climate change. These concerns pertain to AI usage as well. My driving-writing practice is driven by the desire to write. My desire to write is driven at least in part by the hope that I could more fully realize my creativity, the leisurely work whose practice is well-being. So, there is a contradiction between my life and how I live. I risk causing an accident due to distracted driving because I'm taking my chances, hoping to produce a written product that could allow me to accomplish my goal: continuing to answer what I have discerned as God’s call on my life to continue to pursue writing. I suggest that this is analogous to the risk that our society takes by using AI at all: that we might destroy all life through the climatic and social impacts of our energy usage decisions, all while attempting to liberate our creativity.

This returns us to the larger question of meaning. What am I producing all this writing for? Not only the exercise of reason, in which I certainly take great pleasure, but as a matter of Christian martyrdom—in the etymological sense of bearing witness. To die as I lived, having enjoyed a full term of years, is not enough for me. In one sense, since I die to myself, it is as though my term of years has already elapsed. Another order of liberation has already taken place, such that whatever practical toil I might suffer as a follower of Christ is better than any liberation I might have enjoyed otherwise. Whether writing amounts to the exercise of reason or simply to toil, liberation will consist in following Christ, which is a kind of happiness Aristotle could not have anticipated.

That this is at odds with Barthes should already be clear—his approach to Eudaimonism, where it appears in his writings, almost conflates it with the idea of lucky happenstance, in that virtue or character is not what determines either an author’s fate or the meaning of their text. But let us also be clear that this is at odds with Aristotle, who teaches both that “the gods are, of all beings, the most blessed and happy”¹⁷ and that happiness is not within reach of the person who meets “with the greatest misfortunes.”¹⁸ If we were tempted to agree with Aristotle, how might we understand the blessedness of Christ overcoming the misfortune of being crucified?

In writing this, I bear witness to my doubts about my strategy: my doubts about bearing witness using AI through Voice Typing. My writing practice reaches an impasse—I’m forced either to wait or to take the long way around, but I cannot even tell what these two options would look like in practice. Perhaps an impasse such as this is one at which I once again meet Christ.