Just last month, OpenAI announced that it had solved one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, a set of complex unanswered questions proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Then there was Google DeepMind’s new AlphaGenome Atlas, which predicted the biological effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter changes in the human genome. These feats are awe-inspiring.
As are the countless number of milestones and accomplishments each successive AI frontier model has racked up since ChatGPT was launched in 2022. But as we marvel at the machines, what gets crowded out are the humans. While acknowledging the amazing capacity of AI, we shouldn’t lose sight of the irreplaceable value of human-generated awe.
Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at Berkeley, studies the impact that experiences of awe have on our physical and mental health. He describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” The triumphs of AI certainly qualify. But one of Keltner’s studies, which looked at 2,600 stories of awe across 26 countries, had a very revealing finding.
In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.” The finding, Keltner says, caught his team off guard—they were expecting nature and spirituality to come out on top. Keltner called it “moral beauty,” which he defined as “witnessing the kindness, courage, strength, or selflessness of other people.” Of the moral beauty that inspired awe in the study, 95% came from witnessing actions that people took on behalf of others. Keltner listed moral beauty as the first of his “eight wonders of life” that are everyday sources of awe.
The others are collective movement, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, big ideas, and life and death. Technology can play a part in many of those, but they’re mostly deeply shaped by humans and human connection. Many of the benefits of awe have a deeply human element.
Keltner cites research showing that awe quiets the regions of the brain associated with excessive ego, self-criticism and anxiety. And this can have an expansive and collective impact. To be sure, the ease with which our heads can be turned by machines long predates AI and has been with us as long as machines have.
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