Technology is the operating system of culture. Most of the time, we hardly notice it. It works quietly in the background, shaping how we work, communicate, travel, learn, and relate to one another. But every so often, a technology emerges with enough power to change the operating system itself.
We are living through one of those moments.
At dinner last week in California with a Christian coder who works for a generative AI company in San Jose, I asked him which technology in history might best compare with AI in its potential impact on society. I had a candidate in mind, but I wanted to hear his answer first.
He thought for a moment and said the very word I had been considering: “Fire.”
At first, the comparison sounds exaggerated. Fire is so basic to human life we hardly think of it as a technology. Yet the mastery of fire changed our diet, biology, geography, social organization, imagination, and relationship with the natural world. Fire did not simply give early humans another useful tool. It helped create the conditions in which human culture could flourish.
Artificial intelligence may prove similarly consequential.
Public discussion of AI often moves between two poles. On one side are warnings of human extinction. On the other are promises of extraordinary productivity, prosperity, and scientific progress. Both may contain important truths. But both can miss the deeper question: What kind of world is this technology helping to create?
It is the definition of a disruptive technology. It has entered our lives with “post-processable velocity”: a speed exceeding the ability of any individual, company, market, or government to absorb and respond meaningfully. It is now ubiquitous, competitive, complex, and fearful. Business insiders warn that Tech is media. Media is politics. Politics is media and tech. Business is all three. Those who are aware of what is happening feel understandably disoriented. The future is not clear, which is why shared conversations about the changes to our world are needed now more than ever. This is not the time to go it alone or assume that you can figure it out alone. “I don’t know,” is the best first answer for a leader. Fire was significant in human development. AI may prove to be even more so.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has argued for the importance of cooking in human evolution. Cooking makes food easier to chew and digest, while allowing people to draw more energy from it. His provocative idea is simple: We did not merely invent cooking. In an important sense, cooking helped make us human. Fire allowed part of digestion to happen outside the body. A process once performed biologically could now be performed technologically.
Here is a larger principle: Technology does not merely change what human beings can do. Over time, it changes human beings.
AI raises the same possibility in the realm of thought.
Fire externalized certain physical processes. AI externalizes certain cognitive processes. We increasingly use machines to remember, calculate, search, write, translate, analyze, design, summarize, diagnose, and recommend. Tasks once requiring a person’s focused attention can now be performed, at least in part, outside the individual mind.
The comparison is not really between two machines. Fire is not a machine at all. The comparison is between two technologies capable of setting off what we might call civilizational cascades.
Fire made possible cooking, new forms of protection, wider migration, material transformation, metallurgy, agriculture, and eventually industrial civilization. Its importance was not limited to the physical benefits it offered. Fire created the hearth. Around it, people told stories, shared food, remembered the dead, taught skills, and imagined the future. The hearth became a center of social life.
AI may generate its own cascade: cognitive assistance, automation, institutional change, new forms of education and work, shifts in authority, altered relationships, and new understandings of intelligence and personhood.
We are near the beginning of this cascade. More remains unknown than known, so humility is in order. We do not yet know where this journey will take us. But we are facing a civilizational change with few historical parallels.
The Hearth and the Screen
The most important consequence of fire may not have been cooking. It may have been the hearth.
Imagine the scene. Darkness falls. The day’s hunting and gathering come to an end. People gather around warmth and light. Faces become visible. Food is shared. Children listen. Stories are told. Memories are rehearsed. Skills are passed on. The dead are remembered, and the future is imagined.
The hearth became a kind of social architecture.
Culture is not simply information stored in individual minds. It is passed on through relationships, rituals, imitation, stories, memory, and shared attention. The hearth brought these things together. Fire gave human beings more than warmth. It gave them a center.
The physical center became a social center. The social center became a narrative center. In time, the stories told around the hearth helped form a community’s sense of meaning and its vision of the world.
People gathered around the same fire, looked into the same faces, heard the same stories, remembered the same ancestors, and imagined the same future. The hearth helped create a shared world.
Fire also carries deep meaning in Scripture. We see it in the burning bush, in the glory associated with the Temple, and in the tongues of fire at Pentecost. Fire can signify God’s presence, purification, and judgment.
The comparison with AI becomes especially interesting here, because these technologies may initially pull us in opposite directions.
Fire gathers. Digital technology often disperses.
The hearth concentrated attention and created a social center. The smartphone places a separate source of light in every hand. People sit together at a table, yet their attention turns toward individual screens.
The contrast is stark:
- One fire gathers many people around shared attention and common stories.
- Many screens divide attention among individuals and personalized stories.
AI could intensify this fragmentation. We are more connected than ever, yet many people feel increasingly lonely. Information is no longer merely selected for us. It can be generated for us. Two people asking the same question may receive different explanations, examples, images, and arguments, each shaped to their preferences and histories. AI could deepen the frame pluralism already encouraged by digital media.
The hearth helped create a shared world. AI could help us understand our shared world more deeply. Or it could accelerate our movement into millions of personalized worlds.
Neither outcome is inevitable. Technology never acts alone. Culture, institutions, incentives, habits, and human choices shape how a technology enters our lives.
AI and the Territory of Personhood
Here we come to a crucial difference between fire and artificial intelligence.
Fire transformed the environment around the human person. AI enters territory closely associated with the human person and may change how we understand personhood itself.
Fire does not speak back. A hammer does not offer advice. A steam engine does not write poetry. Electricity does not imitate friendship.
AI is different. It operates in the symbolic world of language, images, memory, interpretation, reasoning, and communication. It can imitate forms of conversation and intimacy. It can present information in ways that feel personal, even when no human relationship stands behind the exchange.
Fire changed the human ecological niche. AI may change the human epistemological niche: the environment through which we decide what is true, trustworthy, meaningful, authoritative, and worthy of our attention.
For this reason, AI cannot be understood simply as another productivity tool. It increasingly participates in the processes through which we interpret reality. Its ability to generate convincing text and images can make it harder to judge where information came from, how reliable it is, and what evidence supports it. The problem is not that truth becomes unknowable. The problem is that the work of discerning truth becomes more difficult.
There is another important difference. Fire increased human agency. AI can be given delegated agency.
We are asking machines not only to assist us, but to perform intellectual tasks on our behalf:
Write this.
Analyze this.
Find this.
Design this.
Recommend this.
Monitor this.
Choose among these alternatives.
Make the next decision.
At some point, the question changes. We move beyond asking, What can this technology do for us? The more important question becomes, What should we continue doing for ourselves?
This is an anthropological and ethical question, not merely a technological one.
A calculator can relieve me of arithmetic without threatening my humanity. But what happens when technology increasingly performs tasks involving memory, writing, imagination, interpretation, decision-making, and relationship? The question becomes especially urgent when we consider possible military uses of autonomous AI. What role will human beings retain in decisions with grave consequences?
Which capacities should we continue to exercise, even when machines can perform them more efficiently and draw on more information? Some capacities matter not only because of the results they produce, but because exercising them is part of becoming fully human. Efficiency cannot answer this question. Neither science nor technology can answer it alone.
Every Gain Carries a Cost
Technological history reveals a recurring pattern. Fire externalized aspects of metabolism. Tools extended muscle. Writing externalized memory. Printing expanded the reproduction of knowledge. Engines extended physical power. Telecommunications extended presence. Computers expanded calculation. The Internet expanded access to collective information. AI now externalizes portions of human cognition.
Each step expands human capability. But every externalization also creates the possibility of dependency. Gains can come with losses.
Writing expands our shared memory, while reducing the need to memorize everything. Cars extend mobility, while reducing the need to walk. GPS helps us navigate, while making it easier to neglect our own sense of direction. AI may expand cognitive capability while reducing the need to exercise some of our own.
We can already see the temptation in education. When students use AI to complete assignments without doing the learning, the technology has not simply helped them work. It has helped them avoid the work through which learning happens.
This does not make AI bad. It makes formation necessary.
We should ask not only what a technology helps us gain, but also what we stop practicing because the technology makes the practice seem unnecessary. Muscles weaken when they go unused. Human capacities may weaken in similar ways.
The Speed of Assimilation
Fire also teaches us something about how technologies become part of human life.
The mastery of fire did not transform society overnight. Across long stretches of time, people encountered natural fire, learned to preserve it, experimented with it, gained greater control, organized routines around it, and eventually came to depend on it.
The progression was something like this: event, tool, practice, routine, institution, infrastructure. The decisive change came when the hearth became ordinary. Fire was no longer an occasional advantage. It had become part of the taken-for-granted structure of human existence.
AI appears to be traveling along a similar path, but at extraordinary speed. It was novel. Then it became useful. Now it is increasingly expected. Soon it may become part of the infrastructure of everyday life. Eventually, it may be nearly invisible.
A transformative technology can move from useful to advantageous, from expected to infrastructural, and finally to indispensable. Once this happens, asking whether someone personally “uses AI” may no longer mean much. People will live within hospitals, schools, businesses, governments, transportation systems, communication networks, and financial institutions already shaped by AI.
We do not usually ask whether someone uses electricity. We live in an electrical civilization. Our descendants may similarly live in an AI civilization.
Here lies one of the most sobering differences between fire and AI. Fire transformed human life across vast stretches of time. AI may reshape major institutions within years or decades. Five years ago, the present conversation was far less common. Today, AI is on everyone’s mind.
Technological change has not always moved at the same pace. Agriculture transformed societies over millennia. Writing and printing reshaped civilization over centuries and generations. Electricity spread across decades. The Internet took roughly a generation to remake daily life. Smartphones changed everyday habits in little more than a decade.
Generative AI may move faster still.
This creates a dangerous mismatch: technological change can outpace institutional adaptation, cultural reflection, and moral formation.
Our tools can change faster than our habits. Our habits can change faster than our institutions. Our institutions can change faster than our moral vocabulary. And our moral vocabulary can change faster than our understanding of what human beings are.
The danger may not lie only in the power of artificial intelligence. It may lie in the speed with which we assimilate it.
We may reorganize society around AI before we understand what we have reorganized. The result could be disorientation and paralysis. What we need instead is active, ongoing discernment.
From Panic to Formation
Fire was dangerous from the beginning. It warmed and burned, cooked and destroyed, illuminated and consumed. It could protect a settlement or destroy it. Fire confronted humanity with an enduring question: Can human wisdom keep pace with human power?
Artificial intelligence confronts us with the same question.
Civilization did not respond to fire with an endless debate over whether people were “pro-fire” or “anti-fire.” Communities developed practices for living with it. Children learned not to touch it. People learned how to contain it, when to use it, and what could safely burn. They learned the difference between a hearth and a wildfire. Over time, they developed habits, norms, responsibilities, and institutions around its use.
We need a similar response to AI. It is here to stay, and we will have to learn to use it responsibly. The central question should not be, Are you for AI or against it? That framing is too crude. We should ask: What practices, virtues, institutions, and boundaries will help human beings live wisely with artificial intelligence?
Christians should be part of this conversation. The question of what counts as human flourishing is too important to leave to engineers, investors, or government agencies alone. Serious followers of Jesus have a responsibility to bring moral and spiritual wisdom into public life. This is a time to be salt and light in the world of AI.
Such engagement moves us beyond technological panic and toward technological formation. No technology is neutral in its effects on the people who habitually use it. We form our tools, and then, slowly and often invisibly, our tools participate in forming us.
Fire and AI remind us of a lasting truth: Technology is never merely about technology. Every major technology carries an implicit vision of the human person. It changes our environment, reorganizes our habits, redistributes our capacities, and eventually shapes our assumptions about the kind of creatures we are.
Here is a principle worth remembering: The question facing every civilization-changing technology is not only what the technology makes possible. The deeper question is what kind of people its habitual use makes probable.
Fire helped make a human world. Artificial intelligence now challenges us to decide what kind of human world we intend to make. It is a conversation in which Christians must take part. These are the conversations we must seek out now.
Dr. David John Seel, Jr. is a principal strategist at The Reframe, a firm committed to helping leaders and organizations navigate our change of age (www.reframestrategy.com). Is your organization built for a world that no longer exists? The Reframe sponsors conversations with leaders to address these challenges. Dr. Seel is the author of Liminal Leadership: Tools for Navigating Our Change of Age (2026).
Books by Dr. John Seel, Jr.
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