For decades, economics has been about distributing scarce resources: first labor, then knowledge—both could be capitalized and turned into value. But what happens when knowledge is no longer scarce? When artificial intelligence, with a single click, offers answers to almost anything?

We are standing at the threshold of a new era—one that challenges not just the foundations of economics but also the role of time, creativity, and humanity itself. If everything can be answered instantly, what happens to the questions that require time, depth, and reflection?

AI is often celebrated as a catalyst for creativity and innovation. But in psyhotherapy, I frequently witness the opposite: clients losing touch with the patience and vulnerability required to think clearly, to heal, and to change. Even though AI may make us more knowledgeable, it does not make us wiser.

Instead, it amplifies the illusion of control and distances us from our very humanness, our vulnerability—that same vulnerability that reminds us of our mortality and opens the door to wisdom. Wisdom is born of experience, missteps, and the time it takes for insight to mature. It cannot be rushed—only lived and felt.

Ironically, artificial intelligence reveals an ancient truth: All intelligence is, in some sense, artificially crafted, shaped, and directed. Intelligence is not something we possess, but something we participate in. It’s not a static ability, but a dynamic process that unfolds through time, attention, and experience.

So, what can AI do, and what does it do to us?

AI can expand our horizons, but also reduce us to what the algorithm permits. Social media promises connection but often breeds division. It promises community, yet isolates us in echo chambers. Algorithms reflect our habits and emotions, reinforcing what we already know and closing us off to the unknown, the foreign, and the different.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called this habitus—the invisible structures that govern our dispositions and everyday choices. Algorithms intensify this mechanism, locking us deeper into our own patterns. When data takes over our emotions, we risk losing the freedom to think anew, feel differently, and act otherwise.

Here, philosophy offers an alternative: a poetic form of thinking that disrupts the obvious. Originally bound to poetry, philosophy generates the new. As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us, the self is not a fixed core but an interpretation in constant motion. The poetic lies in the courage to challenge, in doubt, in the unexpected.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that therapy is a poetic practice—a sharing of what is not shared. Therapy, much like democracy, lives through difference, conflict, and creativity. But algorithms often reduce this beautiful complexity to predictability and profit. They undermine democracy (and mental health) not just by stripping us of the ability to reflect and choose but also by eroding the habits that once nurtured our freedom to doubt.

One of the greatest threats AI poses is not just its speed but also the loss of time that questions need to ripen.

British social psychologist Graham Wallas once described the stages of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The second stage—incubation—is when a question or problem rests quietly in the dark. It grows beneath the surface unconsciously. But we live in a culture where everything must happen now, and patience has vanished.

AI gives us answers but doesn’t teach us to ask better questions, to live with uncertainty, or to trust the unknown. As a teacher, I see how students grow accustomed to every problem being solvable with a click. They’ve forgotten how to let a question simmer, to sit with doubt. More than once, I’ve seen students become paralyzed by uncertainty. For them, frustration is no longer a creative force but an unbearable discomfort.

Philosophy doesn’t aim to simplify or remove life’s complexity—it asks us to embrace it. It’s about learning from encounters with the unknown and the other. It’s about discovering wisdom in the courage to stand exposed, open, and vulnerable.

What Western philosophy has always sought to protect—like a newborn—is freedom. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her  Ethics of Ambiguity: “Freedom is the source from which all meaning and value spring.” This freedom is the foundation of both love and creativity. Only free people can love. Only free people can resist AI’s directives, because they can imagine another answer.

Philosophy interrupts the habits that keep us locked in the status quo—and opens us to life’s chaos, richness, and plurality. Where algorithms create surfaces, poetry weaves connections. Philosophy is a poetic force transforming our way of being—how we think, feel, and act.

In the face of algorithmic control, we lack more efficiency and resistance. The ability to resist the ideals that govern us is crucial. Algorithms may shape our habits and predict our choices, but they prevent us from transforming ourselves and inventing new ways of living.

Philosophy does not advocate for a life without error or a world without friction. It insists on freedom to imagine, love, and grow. A society without freedom cannot love. So we must ask: Do algorithms use love as control or inspiration?

Philosophy is not a solution. It is a practice—a counterweight to algorithmic streamlining. It reminds us that what makes us human is not speed or efficiency but the ability to fail, doubt, and recreate ourselves—the ability to love despite everything.

How do we become worthy of what happens, especially when what happens is often… nothing?

And yet, before the silence of the end, we experience love and loss, the uncertainty of choice, and the fear of the unknown. We experience grief and joy, bodily sensations we will never fully understand unless we learn to trust our own judgment.

Who needs a step counter, a sleep tracker, or a heart rate monitor—if they’ve lost touch with themselves?

AI may know everything. But it will never understand death—and its silence. Love—and its radiant joy of living. That’s why we must remember: Intelligence without wisdom isn’t human. It’s only artificial.

And if we forget this, we risk losing what makes us human: the experience of being alive.

This reflections was first publihsed in Psychology Today.

References:

Janning, Finn (2025) “Poetic Philosophy and the Moralization of Social Networks,”Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 2.