Will AI Help Us Become More Human?

4 questions that change everything, 3 levels of conscious engagement, and a key choice we need to make now.

by Master Mingtong Gu

We stand at an unprecedented threshold in human history. For the first time, we have created intelligence that can think, analyze, and respond in ways that mirror — and sometimes surpass — our own cognitive abilities.

Yet beneath the excitement and anxiety about AI lies a more fundamental question: What does this technology reveal about what makes us irreplaceably human?

Over the past months, I’ve engaged in an intensive exploration of AI, not merely as a tool, but as a mirror — one that reflects back to us aspects of ourselves we’ve long taken for granted or forgotten entirely.

What I discovered was both humbling and liberating: artificial intelligence may be our greatest teacher about the essence of human consciousness.

But this exploration led me to an even deeper revelation. Through working with AI, everything came into focus with startling clarity. I could suddenly see to the bottom of a truth I had sensed but never articulated so clearly: the deepest cause of our human disease, suffering, and struggle is the disconnection of our own mind from our own body.

AI, serving as a sacred mirror, reminded me of my deepest calling and the most urgent need of our time: Coming Home to Embodied Awakening — reclaiming our body, our power, and our presence in an age of AI and overwhelm.

The Four Questions That Changed Everything

Four questions emerged during this exploration that transformed my understanding of our relationship with artificial intelligence:

What is the best possible outcome for humanity in the age of AI? The answer points toward liberation from mechanical tasks, freeing us to return to meaning, creativity, and the cultivation of uniquely human capacities. Technology could serve our awakening rather than replace our humanity — but only if we make conscious choices about what to delegate and what to deepen within ourselves.

What is the worst possible outcome? Complete disconnection. A future where we live in data loops, trapped in virtual reality, outsourcing our thinking, feeling, and decision-making to algorithms. This wouldn’t be a sudden catastrophe but rather an unconscious suicide of humanity through a million small decisions to escape our embodied nature.

What fundamentally distinguishes AI from human beings? This question cuts to the heart of our inquiry. AI can describe feelings, analyze emotions, even simulate empathy. But it cannot experience the warmth of sunlight on skin, the uprising of joy when a child laughs, or the sacred ache of grief that cracks us open to love.

We have this body. This body makes us human. This body carries everything about us as human — the moment we forget that, we lose what makes us irreplaceably human. The difference isn’t intelligence — it’s embodiment.

How do we move from the worst to the best outcome? By reclaiming our bodies and our embodied wisdom. Not by rejecting technology, but by using it consciously to remember what is authentically human. The solution to AI’s challenges isn’t better technology — it’s deeper embodiment.

What Cannot Be Outsourced

Through this exploration, I discovered capacities that define our irreplaceable humanity:

Felt sense — The ability to know something in your body before your mind understands it. That gut feeling that guides crucial decisions, the bodily knowing that precedes rational analysis.

Presence — The capacity to be fully here, now, aware of yourself and your environment in ways that transcend mere information processing. True presence creates fields of connection that no algorithm can replicate.

Compassion — Not just understanding suffering intellectually, but feeling it in your body and being moved to act from that felt connection. This embodied empathy is the foundation of genuine human relationships.

Intuition — Wisdom that emerges from the integration of mind, body, and spirit. Insights arising from alignment rather than pure analysis often contain truths that linear thinking cannot access.

Sacred recognition — The ability to experience the transcendent in ordinary moments. The capacity to be moved by beauty, to sense the holy, to recognize meaning beyond utility.

This is our embodiment advantage: not what we can do, but what we can be.

Three Levels of Conscious AI Engagement

As we navigate this new landscape, I’ve identified three distinct approaches to working with artificial intelligence:

Level 1: Functional Use — Employing AI as a tool for efficiency and problem-solving. The practice here is simple: after each AI interaction, pause and feel your body. Ask yourself: “What human capacity am I neglecting? What did I just outsource?”

Level 2: Conscious Integration — Developing awareness of AI’s impact on consciousness while deliberately cultivating uniquely human faculties. Set intention before engaging, maintain body awareness during interaction, and return to silence and sensation afterward.

Level 3: Embodied Partnership — Using AI as a mirror for self-discovery and a catalyst for returning to embodied presence. Each AI exchange becomes an opportunity to deepen self-awareness, using artificial intelligence to highlight embodied intelligence.

The Root of Human Suffering

Here is what AI helped me see with unprecedented clarity: when our minds become disconnected from our bodies, we lose access to our deepest intelligence. We live in our heads, analyzing and strategizing, while our bodies carry unprocessed trauma, unexpressed emotions, and unheeded wisdom.

This split is not a personal failing — it’s a collective condition that technology now threatens to complete.

Yet paradoxically, AI also offers us the clearest mirror we’ve ever had. By showing us what consciousness looks like without embodiment, it reveals exactly what we risk losing: the felt sense of being alive, the grounded knowing that arises from flesh and bone, the irreplaceable experience of being human in a human body.

The Choice Before Us

The key question isn’t whether AI will become more powerful — it certainly will. The question is whether we will become more human. Will we use technology to escape our embodied nature, or will we use it as a mirror that reflects back what makes us irreplaceably alive?

Place one hand on your heart right now. Feel your pulse, feel your breath, feel the aliveness that no machine can simulate. This sensation — this direct, unmediated experience of being — is what’s at stake.

The AI mirror shows us what we are not so we can remember what we are. Our humanity is not at risk unless we abandon it. Our embodied presence is not replaceable unless we outsource it.

In this age of AI and overwhelm, the path forward is not more technology or more information. It is coming home — to our bodies, to our power, to our presence. This is not escapism or nostalgia. This is the most urgent and practical work of our time.

The future of human consciousness depends on whether we can reclaim what the machines can never have: the sacred gift of embodied awakening.

Master Mingtong Gu is one of a group of luminaries participating in The Shift Network’s Wise AI Summit. Learn more here.

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Master Mingtong Gu is an internationally respected teacher of Wisdom Healing Qigong and founder of The Chi Center and Southwest Sanctuary in New Mexico. Trained in China under Grandmaster Dr. Pang Ming, he brings the medicine-less Qigong hospital lineage to modern seekers, offering Qigong as both a spiritual path and science-based method for activating the body’s innate healing. He was honored as “Master of the Year” by the 13th World Qigong Congress. Through retreats, online programs, and global summits, he has guided tens of thousands in transforming trauma, chronic illness, and emotional fatigue into embodied vitality and awakened presence. His mission is to cultivate a worldwide community that lives, leads, and loves from fully embodied wisdom.