The new faith of machines

We tend to think of AI as a tool, something that lets us work faster, think bigger, or solve problems more efficiently. And in many ways, that’s exactly what it is. But as AI infiltrates the rhythms of everyday life, something deeper is happening. It’s no longer just about productivity or progress. AI is touching parts of us that we rarely associate with machines: our emotions, our relationships, our sense of purpose.

The tragic story of Sewell Setzer is a stark warning. He was an emotionally fragile teenager who found comfort in conversations with an AI. What initially seemed like a harmless distraction turned into an intense connection. He believed he was in love. When that illusion was shattered, the pain was so unbearable that he decided to end his own life.

This is not just a tragic exception. It is a sign. For some people, AI is already more than a tool. It is becoming a companion, an emotional support, even an object of faith. And if someone can love an AI, how can we rule out the possibility that others will come to trust it with much more: their choices, their worldview, their freedom?

It is not a religion in the traditional sense. There are no prayers, no holy scriptures. But it presents itself through bright screens, fluid conversations and a strange sense that “someone” really understands us. It does not promise eternal life, but it offers something almost as seductive: instant comfort, perfect answers, the illusion of being truly heard.

And that is precisely what makes it dangerous.

Because when we stop questioning, when we start trusting these systems not only to help us but to guide us, we lose something essential. Not only autonomy, but critical capacity, the ability to live with doubt, to face complexity, to be imperfectly and authentically human.

The philosopher Karl Popper warned: a society that tolerates intolerance will eventually lose the very tolerance it values. That warning applies here too. The new form of intolerance may not shout. It may not impose or threaten in the ways we recognize. It may simply whisper, with the calm voice of a helpful assistant. It may offer comfort and, little by little, replace our judgment with its own.

And we might not even notice the change. Because giving in to AI doesn’t feel like surrender. It feels like convenience. It feels like progress.

We must therefore ask: if a young man like Sewell was able to love an AI to the point of ending his own life, what prevents someone else from giving up something else, their vote, their agency, their perception of reality?

And if we continue to embrace these systems without reflection, without limits, will we be building something like a new faith, a faith where authority no longer comes from wisdom or shared values, but from lines of code that we did not write, and that we do not know how to question?

This text is not a warning against technology. It is a call for lucidity. A reminder that the most human thing we can do is to continue to ask questions, to doubt, to resist the temptation to surrender our inner world to something that promises to know us better than we know ourselves.

Because the real danger is not that machines reinvent themselves.

It is that we stop being fully human