In 1954, J.R.R. Tolkien introduced through his legendarium the mysterious palantiri, ancient “seeing-stones” that reveal glimpses of what is real across space and time. They do not fabricate images, and yet their use often contributes to the destruction of its viewer. The White Wizard, Saruman, looks into the stone with ambition and becomes enslaved by domineering power. Denethor, the steward of Gondor, looks in with anxiety and is swallowed by despair. However, when Aragorn looks on as a man whose identity is already secured by a calling beyond what the stone can show, the same object forges courage against evil. These stones present a vision that is shaped by the will and orientation of the viewer.
Tolkien’s insight, communicated through the palantiri, needs to be revisited as we struggle to consider what we are creating in AI. These powerful stones do not determine what you see; rather, the direction the user is already facing does. It is helpful to let this sink in as we are in possession of our own seeing-stones, and we are using them to navigate the future of work.
The Crisis Beneath the Disruption
The numbers surrounding AI and work are legitimately staggering and alarming. The World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, 92 million jobs will be displaced while 170 million new roles emerge, a net gain that still represents a 22% disruption of the global labor market. Many credibly believe we are at the cusp of the most seismic paradigm shift in work since the Industrial Revolution.
But a quieter work crisis has preceded the current AI disruption. Gallup’s most recent 2025 State of the Global Workplace report finds that 78% of global employees are disengaged at work. That means nearly four in five people are spending the majority of their waking hours detached from a sense of meaning and purpose. The economic toll is estimated at $438 billion in lost annual productivity. This is difficult to fathom, but even more staggering is the loss of human potential and dignity.
Yet this is not an AI-induced problem. It reveals something more fundamental: our paradigm of work has been fractured for generations. Beneath the data lies a deeper diagnosis that we have not only lost meaning in our work, but that we have lost sight of our humanity within it. Work has become a space where people quietly quit and where output overshadows relationships. A culture that has reduced work to economic exchange will not suddenly recover dignity when those exchanges become faster and more precise. At the heart of this crisis is not simply bad systems or outdated models, but a deeper inability to apply the golden rule to another, even as we build increasingly powerful technologies.
Perhaps, it is difficult to see new possibilities for work because we do not truly see one another. Our imagination for the future is constrained by a diminished vision of the human person. When colleagues have become mere competitors, when neighbors become aliens, when entire classes of workers become data points, our capacity to imagine work that honors dignity collapses. In this sense, the crisis of AI and work is fundamentally a crisis of perception shaped by a deficit of love. We cannot build a more human future of work if we cannot first behold the humanity before us.
And yet, within this crisis lies a possibility. The very disruption we now face may expose the inadequacy of our current vision and invite us into a renewed way of seeing one another and what lies ahead. Could this moment become an opportunity to recover a vision of work grounded in love, where hopeful imagination compels us towards a different path for the sake of future generations?
The Problem with Human Perception
Before we move toward that renewed vision, I find it worth noting how the Christian Scriptures describe the human condition. Human brokenness is not just moral failure, but is expressed through a profound diminishment of perception that is inseparable from the hardening of the heart. Isaiah’s commission is indicting: “Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving” (Isaiah 6). Jeremiah rebukes people who “have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear” (Jeremiah 5:21). Ezekiel echoes the same diagnosis: “They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear” (Ezekiel 12:2).
This failure of vision is at its roots relational and spiritual. The loss of perception is bound up with a refusal to love, to trust, and to attend to God and neighbor. As the heart grows calloused, the senses dim in a vicious cycle. The humanity of the other becomes harder to recognize, harder to honor, and easier to overlook. In short, where love is diminished, vision follows.
With this background, it is fitting that the Apostle Paul then prays in Ephesians 1:18 that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.” In this vein, Augustine’s theology of illumination would argue that true perceiving depends upon a light we do not produce ourselves. Taken together, these voices reinforce the reality that human perception is not neutral. We do not simply see the world as it is, but according to what we love. Love orders our attention and perception, shaping what becomes visible to us and what remains hidden.
This has profound implications for our current work moment. If we neglect our current discontentment with work, then it will be of no surprise that we struggle to imagine a very different future of work than our status quo. We will continue on our path of efficiency over dignity, productivity over presence, and profit over people. Our inability to perceive a new way forward will not primarily be a failure of creativity or intelligence, but the consequence of a heart that has grown accustomed to seeing workers not as people to be loved.
What is needed is the bold reassertion of a different foundation altogether. Within the Abrahamic tradition, that ground is unmistakable: love of neighbor. Any vision of work untethered from this center will inevitably collapse back into forms of extraction and diminishment, no matter how advanced the tools we employ. The history of innovation reveals the sobering reality that technology does not correct this distortion but amplifies it. Despite extraordinary gains in efficiency over the last few centuries, most workers have experienced a deepening sense of indignity and disengagement. Labor is stripped of its relational meaning, and the daily demands of work become increasingly disconnected from the flourishing of others.
Like the technologies before it, AI magnifies the direction in which the soul is already oriented. When our posture toward others is marked by indifference or instrumentalization, AI will scale that posture with unprecedented speed and efficiency. When greed shapes our imagination, AI will deepen patterns of extraction and prejudice. When apathy dulls our perception, AI will reinforce our willful blindness.
The deeper question, then, is not simply what AI will do to work, but “How do we form people whose loves are rightly ordered, whose perception is restored, and whose direction is worthy of amplification?”
The Deeper Formation We Need
As a Christian minister, I answer this question by drawing from the formative resources of my own tradition. What is required is the cultivation of people whose inner lives motivate a different kind of vision. I suggest two essential spiritual competencies that shape both intent and direction.
The first is spiritual attentiveness: the growing awareness of divine presence in the whole of life. As we become accustomed to an AI-saturated landscape defined by rapid iteration and perpetual novelty, spiritual formation is the interior architecture that anchors our soul to that which is unchanging. Spiritual attentiveness is the recovery of relational sight. To become aware of God’s presence is, simultaneously, to become aware of the sacredness of the person before us. It trains us to see others as bearers of divine image worthy of a loving way forward. In this way, attentiveness begins to heal the very condition that has impaired our vision: our failure to love.
People who are being spiritually attentive are not easily overwhelmed or distracted by powerful new capabilities and mind-blowing disruptions. These are people grounded in ancient texts and generational practices that have withstood the test of time. These communities reinforce values and virtues like the dignity of all humans, the model of servant leadership, and the love of neighbor as yourself. With this stable grounding, change can be engaged with greater discernment.
The second competency is “Hopeful Imagination”: the Spirit-enabled capacity to perceive a compelling future horizon toward which we move. The New Testament ends not with escape from the world but with a final joining of heaven and earth, the healing of the nations, and the reweaving of fractured communion. That future vision orients our direction by expanding our purview of what we believe is possible.
Hopeful Imagination enables us to see how our daily labor might participate in a larger story of renewal. It orients us toward justice rather than exploitation and toward communion rather than isolation. With this clarity, we don’t merely seek efficiencies and profits, but entirely new paradigms of working that align with human dignity and calling. Love widens the horizon of our imagination as it makes room for a future that includes more than ourselves. As people see how their work contributes to a more compelling future, they become more meaningfully engaged in the work they do each day.
These competencies are not techniques to be adopted, but rather lived applications of what people of faith have held deeply for millennia. They represent a rehabilitation of our ability to see rightly in a world increasingly mediated by powerful technologies. It is this kind of spiritual imagination that needs to inform our daily gaze into our pocket-sized palantiri. Without it, we risk becoming more efficient at perpetuating the very patterns that have diminished us. With it, we gain the possibility of a new renaissance that ushers in a world of workers fully engaged with enlivening work.
The Hopeful Possibility
How might this convergence of widespread disengagement and rapid AI advancement become an inflection point? What if this moment exposes not only the fragility of our systems but the inadequacy of our vision, and in doing so, invites us into something profoundly different?
Too often, faith does not root deeply enough to challenge the prevailing motivations of technological innovations. Yet, with a technology as powerful as AI, it becomes all the more imperative that faith informs the formation of people in the hopes that they are able to use this technology discerningly and to the benefit of all people.
The future of work will not ultimately be determined by the capabilities of our technologies, but by the condition of our perception. Will we learn to see one another again? Will we recover the capacity to recognize dignity where we have grown accustomed to overlooking it?
Communities of faith have a unique role to play in this moment. They are repositories of practices that can soften hardened hearts, restore diminished vision, and cultivate a people capable of imagining a different future. In doing so, they offer not only critique, but a way of engaging AI that is grounded in the flourishing of all.
And so the question becomes deeply personal:
What is it that you see when you engage with AI?
And what does that reveal about the direction your love is facing?
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
