A Conversation with Benedict Gorman

“The Nail on Man’s (Empty) Coffin: How AI Furthers Interior Emptiness” 

Can AI gaze at the stars and contemplate its place in the universe? Can AI have leisure? If not, why do we talk about it as if it can? Questions like these and others inspired Benedict Gorman to write on the rise of AI’s effects on human psychology, and how it relates to man’s overall place in the cosmos.  

While taking HSCP 490, Humans and Robots in Spring 2025, Benedict recalled the 1987 book, Between the Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, by Erazim Kohák. In his book, Kohák addresses the issue of man losing his place in the natural world due to an increased dependence on technology. As we become more dependent on technology, we lose a reverence towards nature, and, as Benedict would say, we no longer light lamps in the dark, but rather against it. 

From the technological standpoint, nature is reducible to particles and is something to be conquered, rather than stand in awe of. Benedict saw that the rise of AI was now doing the same thing to human thought: reducing it to particles and processes. As Benedict pointed out, AI simply cannot think as a human can: we are human beings, not human doings. AI is a machine that responds to prompts, and man exists. The problem for Benedict is that many people have forgotten what it means to be alive in a way that ChatGPT is not, and, as a result, we are losing our sense of self: we are becoming empty. 

AI is relatively new, and, as Benedict would say, has “knocked our socks off,” so that there still lies much speculation about how AI will affect humans going forward. What is clear for Benedict is that many people have been tricked into thinking AI thinks like them, and they have lost their sense of uniqueness in the universe and become just another box of particles. 

Benedict is clear, technology has done immense good for humanity; anyone would hate not having modern medicine. It is humans who have become confused about their place in the universe. Many people have forgotten that, unlike them, AI cannot read great books or, even more profoundly, believe in God. 

Only when humans stop viewing the world as just a machine, a mere box of particles, can they begin to recover a true sense of self in nature. Only when people receive their identity from God can it never be taken from him. Ideally, Benedict would like his paper to be read by the “C-Suite of Meta,” but most importantly, he wants us all to recover a sense-of-self between the embers and the stars. Benedict graduated with a degree in Nursing in 2025 and is currently working as a Nurse at Children’s National Hospital.