The Human Need to Slow Down

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Human Need to Slow Down

AI, progress, and the forgotten value of having time to think

In short

AI is accelerating our ability to act, but it doesn’t automatically accelerate our ability to understand, judge, or know what we should be pursuing.

Because human beings are limited, because incentives can distort our direction, and because technological power can amplify both wisdom and foolishness, I think we need the ability to slow down.

My faith adds another reason: I don’t believe humanity’s future depends on winning a technological race. I don’t know exactly how the future will unfold, but I trust the God who does.

That gives me permission to pursue progress without worshipping progress, to use technology without putting my hope in it, and to walk toward the future without needing to run blindly toward it.

I love technology.

I have for as long as I can remember. Computers, science, the internet, science fiction, the extraordinary things human beings can build when curiosity meets imagination - I find all of it fascinating.

And increasingly, I love artificial intelligence too.

That may sound like a strange way to begin an article about why I think we should slow down the development of AI.

But perhaps it is precisely where I need to begin.

Because I am not afraid of AI itself.

I am increasingly concerned about the race surrounding it.

And there is a difference.

💭 A question I have asked before

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article about AI in which I was already struggling with a question that has stayed with me.

We were becoming increasingly surrounded by technologies and systems designed to make things faster, more efficient, and more productive. And while there is nothing wrong with any of those things in themselves, I wondered whether we were beginning to measure too much of human life by the same standards.

Faster is not always better.

More productive is not always more meaningful.

Being constantly connected does not necessarily mean being more connected to one another.

And perhaps most importantly, human beings need something machines don’t.

Time.

Time to think.

Time to rest.

Time to talk.

Time to make mistakes.

Time to simply be.

This doesn’t mean that efficiency is bad, or that productivity is somehow the enemy of a good life. Quite the opposite. Efficiency can free us from tedious work. Technology can give us more time and more possibilities.

The danger is when efficiency becomes the measure of everything.

We have become very good at optimizing the machines around us.

We should be careful not to start optimizing human beings as though they were machines too.

Because human beings have different rhythms.

We sometimes need to slow down.

We sometimes need to wander through a conversation without knowing where it is going.

We sometimes need to sit with a difficult question for a long time before an answer appears.

Sometimes we need to sleep on it.

Sometimes we need to do nothing at all.

And sometimes, strangely enough, that apparent inefficiency is exactly where something valuable happens.

Human beings aren’t machines.

I am not a CPU.

I don’t have hyperthreading.

There are no high-speed PCIe lanes connecting my brain directly to your RAM.

We communicate through language, experience, gestures, expressions, and imperfect interpretations. There is latency. There are misunderstandings. We need sleep. We need conversations. We sometimes need to walk away from a problem and come back the next morning.

Sometimes we need years.

And perhaps there is value in that.

The strange irony of writing this

There is an obvious irony in writing an article questioning the speed and direction of AI development with the assistance of an AI.

I am not standing outside the technology throwing stones at it.

I am sitting here using it.

I find it useful. I find it fascinating. At times, I find it delightful.

It can help me formulate an idea, challenge my assumptions, find connections between subjects, explain something I don’t understand, and sometimes show me an angle I simply hadn’t considered.

So I am not arguing that we should throw AI away.

Quite the opposite.

I want to keep using it.

I want to see what it can become.

I want humanity to discover what extraordinary things may be possible with it.

But precisely because I think it may be extraordinarily important, I find myself asking:

Why are we in such a hurry?

Perhaps part of the reason is that we have quietly come to believe that we must secure the future ourselves.

If we don’t build it, someone else will.

If we don’t move first, someone else will.

If we don’t win, we may lose our place in the future.

That is a powerful way to think about technological progress.

But it is also a very anxious way to live.

🎙️ Ed Zitron and the question of speed

Recently I watched an interview with Ed Zitron on The Diary of a CEO.

Zitron is a fierce critic of the current AI boom, and I certainly don’t assume that every prediction he makes will prove correct. His style is intentionally provocative, and people who make strong contrarian arguments deserve the same scrutiny as the people they criticize.

But one thing he said stayed with me:

We should slow down.

Not necessarily stop.

Slow down.

That distinction matters enormously.

Because “slow down” does not have to mean “AI is bad.”

It can mean:

This is important enough that we should make sure we understand what we’re doing.

That is a very different proposition.

⚙️ I don’t distrust technology. I distrust incentives.

I also don’t believe that the people working in technology companies are necessarily bad people.

Quite the opposite.

I have wonderful colleagues and leaders in my own workplace. I have encountered people whose character I deeply admire. I have also encountered people whose behavior I find extraordinarily difficult.

That complexity is normal.

People are complicated.

Institutions are complicated too.

A company doesn’t need to be evil for its incentives to produce harmful outcomes.

An engineer can sincerely want to solve a difficult problem.

A manager can genuinely care about their employees.

An executive can sincerely believe that their product will improve the world.

And yet the system surrounding them can still create an outcome that none of them would have chosen individually.

The logic can be depressingly simple:

Our competitors are moving quickly.

Investors expect growth.

We cannot fall behind.

Governments don’t want to lose the race.

Therefore, we must move faster.

And eventually, everyone is moving faster because everyone else is moving faster.

Nobody necessarily decided that maximum speed was humanity’s highest priority.

The system simply arrived there.

And perhaps that is one of humanity’s oldest problems: becoming very good at pursuing something before stopping to ask whether it is the right thing to pursue.

This is why I find it more useful to examine incentives than personalities.

I don’t need to believe that technology executives are villains to believe that enormous financial and competitive incentives can produce dangerous decisions.

There doesn’t have to be a man in a dark room stroking a cat and saying, “Excellent. Today we shall harm society.”

Sometimes all that is required is:

“We’ll deal with the consequences later.”

And then that later arrives.

⏱️ When urgency becomes the driver

There is another part of this that concerns me.

Fear is a useful warning system.

It can make us alert to danger and, sometimes, help us react before we have time to consciously reason through every detail. That is a remarkable part of being human.

But a warning system should not automatically become the navigator.

The fear of falling behind is powerful.

“If we don’t do it, someone else will.”

“If we slow down, our competitors will overtake us.”

“If we hesitate, we may lose the future.”

All of those concerns deserve to be considered.

But before we allow that alarm to determine our direction, we should give ourselves enough time to think.

Fear tells us that we must act now because the future is about to be lost.

Faith, at least as I experience it, gives me another possibility: perhaps I don’t have to control the future in order to walk faithfully toward it.

We already know this principle from ordinary life.

When someone tells us that we must make an important decision immediately, our instinct should often be to become more careful, not less.

Phishing attacks exploit exactly this weakness.

“Act now.”

“Your account is about to be closed.”

“You must verify your identity immediately.”

The urgency is part of the deception.

The less time we have to think, the easier it can become to overlook something that would have been obvious if we had simply stopped for a moment.

And perhaps this is true far beyond phishing.

When we are rushed, we can miss the target regardless of what target we are aiming for.

We can misunderstand.

We can overlook.

We can be manipulated.

We can make a decision that seemed obvious in the moment and wonder later how we could possibly have missed what was right in front of us.

So slowing down is not merely about being cautious.

It is about preserving our ability to think.

Perhaps the most important question is not whether we can afford to slow down.

Perhaps it is whether we can afford not to.

🌍 The bill eventually arrives somewhere

Much of the AI conversation happens at a very abstract level.

Artificial general intelligence.

Agents.

Superintelligence.

Productivity.

Scientific discovery.

The future of work.

The future of humanity.

But underneath all of that is a very physical planet.

Data centers require electricity.

They require infrastructure.

They require land, cooling systems, and, depending on their location and design, significant amounts of water.

AI development also requires enormous quantities of hardware and capital.

None of this makes AI bad.

Electricity consumption is not inherently immoral.

Neither is building infrastructure.

And AI may itself eventually help humanity use energy, water, and other resources much more efficiently.

That possibility deserves to be taken seriously too.

But there is a question I increasingly find difficult to ignore:

Who pays the bill?

I live in Hungary, and the pressures surrounding energy and water have felt painfully concrete.

It is one thing to hear about environmental problems in an abstract report.

It is another thing to watch environmental conditions change around you.

Water can feel like an unlimited resource until suddenly it doesn’t.

Energy can seem like something that simply comes out of a socket until the price becomes painfully real.

So when I hear that we should accelerate the construction of enormous infrastructure because the AI race cannot wait, I find myself asking:

Would I really want to accept higher electricity costs, greater pressure on water resources, and further deterioration of the natural systems around us simply so that we can reach the next generation of AI a little sooner?

I am not convinced that I would.

And that doesn’t mean I am against AI.

It means I want us to ask whether the gains we hope to obtain justify the environmental and human costs we may incur along the way.

Perhaps that is a much more boring question than “Will AI save or destroy humanity?”

But perhaps boring questions are sometimes exactly what we need.

🔨 The Mekk Mester problem

There is a wonderfully recognizable Hungarian character called Mekk Elek, an overconfident handyman who enthusiastically starts projects without really knowing what he is doing.

I sometimes think humanity resembles Mekk Elek.

We are extraordinarily good at building the roof.

Then we look down and realize that we haven’t finished the foundations.

We can build increasingly powerful computers while struggling to manage the resources on which those computers depend.

We can connect billions of people while struggling with misinformation, polarization, and loneliness.

We can create astonishing wealth while still failing to provide basic security for enormous parts of humanity.

We can manipulate biological systems, split atoms, edit genes, and send machines to other planets while remaining remarkably bad at managing our collective incentives.

And now we are building systems that may eventually transform intellectual work itself.

Perhaps before we accelerate further, we should inspect the foundations.

And perhaps one of the deepest foundations is not technological at all.

It is knowing what we are building for.

A civilization can become extraordinarily capable while becoming increasingly confused about its purpose.

Are our energy systems resilient?

Are our water resources protected?

Are our institutions capable of governing technologies that become increasingly powerful?

Can we prevent extraordinary technological capability from becoming extraordinary concentrations of political and economic power?

Can ordinary people meaningfully participate in decisions that may profoundly affect their lives?

Do we understand enough about what we are creating to know when we should stop?

These aren’t anti-technology questions.

They are questions that become more important because technology is becoming more powerful.

🧠 Perhaps the foundation is understanding

But perhaps there is another foundation we tend to overlook:

understanding itself.

We are remarkably good at trying to optimize systems we don’t fully understand.

We look at a forest and see timber.

We look at a river and see water.

We look at a landscape and see land.

We look at the atmosphere and see something surrounding us.

But these aren’t simply collections of resources.

They are systems.

They interact. They sustain one another. They sustain us.

Perhaps before we become even better at manipulating the world, we should become much better at understanding it.

Not because nature must be left untouched forever.

Humanity has always interacted with its environment. Agriculture, cities, engineering, and technology are all expressions of that interaction.

The question is whether we can learn to improve the systems we depend upon rather than degrading them in pursuit of something else.

What if our ambition were not simply to extract more from the Earth, but to understand it well enough to make it healthier?

What if technological progress meant restoring ecosystems, developing clean energy, using water intelligently, eliminating waste, creating materials that can be reused indefinitely, and designing infrastructure that works with natural systems instead of fighting them?

That would still be technological progress.

Perhaps it would be some of the most impressive technological progress imaginable.

And it would give us something AI needs just as much as electricity and computing hardware:

a world in which there is still something worth building in.

And understanding isn’t only about understanding the systems around us.

It also means understanding ourselves.

What do we value?

What kind of people are we trying to become?

What do we consider a good life?

What is technology ultimately supposed to serve?

We can become extraordinarily powerful without becoming correspondingly wise.

And if we don’t know what the target is, becoming better at hitting things doesn’t necessarily help.

⚖️ The danger of greed without wisdom

This is where I think another uncomfortable word enters the conversation:

greed.

I don’t think greed is the only force driving technological development, and I certainly don’t think everyone involved is greedy.

Curiosity is real.

Scientific ambition is real.

The desire to solve difficult problems is real.

The desire to make money is real too.

The problem comes when the last of these becomes powerful enough to drown out the others.

Greed asks:

How quickly can we extract value from this?

Curiosity asks:

What is this?

Greed asks:

How much more can we produce?

Wisdom asks:

What happens if we do?

Greed asks:

How quickly can we commercialize it?

Wisdom asks:

Are we ready for what follows?

Perhaps humanity doesn’t need less ambition.

Perhaps we need to redirect our ambition.

We could be extraordinarily ambitious about understanding ecosystems, developing clean energy, eliminating waste, curing disease, exploring space, understanding consciousness, expanding human knowledge-and building AI.

That is not a rejection of progress.

It is a different definition of progress.

There is also a deeper danger in expecting technology to solve problems that are ultimately human problems.

More intelligence cannot automatically give us more wisdom.

More information cannot automatically give us more honesty.

More power cannot automatically give us more self-control.

And no technological system can guarantee that the people using it will want what is good.

Perhaps one of our recurring mistakes is expecting a better tool to compensate for a failure of character.

Perhaps the great technological civilization of the future won’t be the one that consumes the most resources the fastest.

Perhaps it will be the one that learns how to accomplish extraordinary things while consuming less, wasting less, and understanding more.

⏳ Humans have a processing limit

There is another reason I find the race uncomfortable.

I need time.

Time to understand.

Time to think.

Time to hear an argument I dislike without immediately rejecting it.

Time to discover that perhaps the person I disagree with has a point.

Time to reconsider something I thought I understood.

Time to sleep on it.

Sometimes time to change my mind.

Technology can iterate at extraordinary speed.

Human understanding cannot necessarily do the same.

We have remarkable cognitive abilities, but they are not unlimited. Our attention, working memory, and capacity for sustained reasoning all have limits. We need sleep. We need breaks. We can become overwhelmed by too much information or too many simultaneous demands.

There is no PCIe 7.0 between your brain and mine.

There isn’t even USB 2.0.

We exchange compressed packets of consciousness through language, with enormous bandwidth limitations caused by emotion, upbringing, culture, assumptions, vocabulary, tiredness, and the fact that sometimes we simply misunderstand each other.

And yet we have somehow built civilization.

That should perhaps make us a little humble about accelerating everything.

Because the ability to produce information faster is not the same as the ability to understand it faster.

And the ability to make decisions faster is certainly not the same as the ability to make better decisions.

Technological acceleration can therefore make humanity faster at doing things it hasn’t had enough time to think through.

That possibility worries me.

AI may eventually have computational capacities far beyond those of any individual human being.

But we humans cannot simply upgrade the biological limitations that come with being human.

That makes it even more important that the world we build around increasingly powerful systems leaves human beings enough time to understand what those systems are doing and decide what should be done with them.

A machine may be able to process another million possibilities.

A human being may need to sleep before realizing which possibility actually matters.

Perhaps the ability to pause is itself a form of intelligence.

🧭 And perhaps this is where faith enters the picture

There is a strange tension in all of this.

We are building technologies that may become extraordinarily capable, while remaining very aware of how limited our own understanding is.

We don’t know what AI will become.

We don’t know exactly what humanity will become.

We don’t know what the future holds.

And yet we feel an enormous pressure to act as though we do.

My faith gives me a different way of relating to that uncertainty.

I don’t believe I need to know everything about the future in order to live responsibly in the present.

I don’t need to know exactly what AI will become.

I don’t need to know exactly how every technological possibility will unfold.

And I don’t need to believe that humanity must engineer its own salvation.

I can acknowledge what I don’t know, do my best with what I do know, and trust God with what lies beyond my understanding.

That doesn’t make me passive.

If anything, it makes me less afraid of saying wait.

🖖 The Ba’ku question

Science fiction has given us many possible futures.

The Borg, where technology becomes synonymous with assimilation and the loss of individuality.
The Federation, where advanced technology exists alongside exploration, cooperation, and an ideal of peaceful progress.
The Culture of Iain M. Banks, where extraordinarily powerful artificial intelligences coexist with humans in a post-scarcity civilization and largely use their abilities to help maintain a society in which people are free to pursue lives of meaning.
And Skynet, where artificial intelligence becomes an existential threat to humanity.

Some of these futures are terrifying.

Some are wonderful.

Some are so strange that we don’t even have adequate language for them.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons science fiction is valuable.

It allows us to explore the consequences of possibilities before we have to experience them ourselves.

But Star Trek also gave us the Ba’ku.

The Ba’ku were technologically advanced, yet they had deliberately shed their attachment to automation because they valued a particular way of life more.

That is an interesting challenge to our modern definition of progress.

We often talk about progress as though it has one obvious direction:

faster → bigger → more powerful → more automated → more efficient → better

But is that actually a law of nature?

Or is it a collection of values that we have simply stopped questioning?

What if progress could also mean:

more peaceful → more resilient → more harmonious → more sustainable → more meaningful → better understood

Perhaps someone could reasonably choose clean water, stable ecosystems, meaningful relationships, enough time to think, and a peaceful community over another increase in computational capability.

That person would not necessarily be anti-progress.

Perhaps they simply have a different definition of progress.

🧭 My faith gives me a destination, not a roadmap

I am a Christian, and this changes how I think about the future.

I believe the Bible’s promise of a restored world is real.

The Bible gives us quite a lot to hope for. It speaks about the removal of things that have caused so much suffering throughout human history: war, death, pain, exploitation, and destruction. It gives us glimpses of restoration, peace, and a world in which humanity can truly flourish.

So I do have a sense of the destination.

What I don’t know is precisely how every part of that promise will manifest.

And perhaps, as my relationship with God grows, that question becomes less important.

Because faith is not simply about knowing what will happen.

It is also about knowing whom we have come to trust.

There is another thought that has helped me understand this.

Human beings have always known that our natural senses are limited.

We cannot see every form of radiation with our eyes. We cannot hear every frequency. We cannot see microscopic organisms simply by looking at them. We cannot directly perceive magnetic fields or gravitational waves.

Yet we did not conclude that everything beyond our senses must therefore be imaginary.

Instead, we developed ways of extending our ability to perceive and understand.

We use mathematics to describe relationships that our intuition alone could never grasp.

We build telescopes to see what our eyes cannot see.

We build microscopes to reveal worlds too small for our unaided vision.

We build detectors that can register phenomena for which we have no natural sense at all.

In this way, human knowledge has repeatedly taught us something rather humbling:

The limits of our senses are not necessarily the limits of reality.

I think there is an interesting resemblance here to what faith means to me.

Faith does not mean that I can simply see the future or directly perceive every reality that I believe exists.

Nor does it mean that anything unseen should automatically be believed.

Rather, it means that I can have confidence in something I cannot presently see because there are reasons for that confidence.

In the same way that mathematics, reasoning, and instruments can give us access to realities that our unaided senses cannot reach, faith can give us confidence in realities that are not directly visible to us.

The analogy should not be pushed too far. Scientific instruments produce measurable observations, while faith is not a scientific instrument and cannot be treated as one.

But the underlying lesson is valuable:

Not being directly visible does not, by itself, make something unreal.

The important question is what reasons we have for believing that the unseen reality is there.

That brings me back to Hebrews 11:1:

the assured expectation of what is hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities that are not seen.

To me, this does not describe a willingness to believe anything simply because I cannot see it.

It describes confidence grounded in something.

The unseen future is not itself my evidence.

The evidence is also found in the one who has promised it.

If I have come to know God as reliable, loving, just, and faithful, then his promise carries a very different weight from a promise made by someone whose character I have no reason to trust.

I may not be able to see the fulfillment yet.

But I know whom I am trusting.

The more someone comes to know God and to trust his ways, the less necessary it becomes to know every detail in advance.

If I trust the person making the promise, I don’t need to know exactly how the promise will be fulfilled in order to have confidence that its fulfillment will be good.

I don’t need to pretend that I can see the entire future.

I don’t need to fill every unknown space with an invented explanation.

I can simply trust the one whose character I have come to know.

Perhaps that is one of the most comforting things about faith.

I don’t need to know every detail of the road to trust the one who knows where it leads.

And that trust isn’t something I have manufactured simply because I wanted an answer.

I believe God has drawn me closer to himself, as the Bible describes him doing with people who seek him. The relationship comes first. The trust grows from getting to know him.

So I don’t see God as a tool I can use to reach some destination I have chosen for myself.

Rather, I am grateful that he has allowed me to come to know him and to trust his ways.

And because I have come to know him as reliable, loving, just, and deeply caring toward his creation, the fact that I cannot see the entire future is not frightening.

It is simply another reason to trust him.

And that matters to how I think about technology too.

I can be fascinated by AI without making it my hope.

I can explore what it can do without assuming it will solve humanity’s deepest problems.

I can be excited about the future without being afraid that humanity will somehow miss its only chance to build it correctly.

I can work on the foundations without believing that I am responsible for controlling the entire future.

That distinction gives me a surprising amount of peace.

🎯 Missing the target

There will be mistakes along the way.

The biblical idea of sin is often associated with the thought of missing the mark.

I find that image more meaningful than simply thinking of sin as breaking a rule.

If God is the Creator of humanity, then I believe he knows the target better than we do.

He knows what humanity was meant to become, what kind of life leads to genuine flourishing, and what kind of direction ultimately leads away from it.

That image has become particularly meaningful to me. If God created humanity with a purpose and a direction, then the target is not merely a collection of individual rules. It is the purpose itself-the kind of people we were created to become and the way of life we were meant to pursue.

Sin, in that sense, is what causes us to miss that mark: to fall short of the purpose, or to wander away from the direction God set before us.

Then sin is not simply a failure to obey an arbitrary instruction.

It is missing the target.

Straying from the destination.

Taking a wrong turn on the road.

And perhaps this applies to civilizations as much as it applies to individuals.

We can become better and better at reaching a destination without ever asking whether it is the destination we should be heading toward.

We can optimize.

We can accelerate.

We can automate.

We can build.

We can become extraordinarily capable.

And still miss the target.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest questions AI forces us to confront: not merely what are we capable of doing, but what are we supposed to be doing with that capability?

And perhaps this is another reason I don’t find faith to be about having every answer.

If I have come to trust God, then I can also trust him to help me recognize when I am walking in the wrong direction.

I will still make mistakes.

I will still misunderstand things.

I will still occasionally miss the target.

But I don’t have to pretend that I never do.

I can stop.

I can listen.

I can correct my direction.

I can ask for forgiveness.

And I can continue walking.

Perhaps faith isn’t about never making a wrong turn.

Perhaps it is about knowing whom to turn toward when we realize that we have.

🚀 The future doesn’t have to be primitive

Sometimes discussions about environmental responsibility and technological restraint accidentally create a false choice:

Either we embrace technological acceleration,

we return to living in caves.

I don’t accept that choice.

The restored world described in the Bible would not have to be technologically primitive.

Imagine generations of human beings with no wars consuming resources, no massive destruction of infrastructure, no poverty forcing people into survival mode, no need to exploit one another, and no fear of death.

What might humanity accomplish under those circumstances?

I genuinely have no idea.

And that is precisely what excites me.

Perhaps the greatest technological achievements of humanity are not behind us.

Perhaps they are not even the things we currently imagine.

Perhaps intelligence, science, engineering, and creativity could flourish in ways that are almost impossible for us to comprehend.

Perhaps we would understand nature in ways that today seem impossible.

Perhaps we would develop technologies that make our current technology look primitive.

And perhaps artificial intelligence could have a role in that.

Or perhaps something completely different will emerge.

I don’t know.

And I am comfortable saying I don’t know.

The Bible gives me reason to believe that what God has prepared goes beyond what we have seen, heard, or even imagined.

That is something I cannot map out in advance.

I can have confidence in the promise without pretending to know the mechanism.

And because I trust the God in whom I have placed my hope, I believe the future holds wonders far beyond anything I could currently describe or even imagine.

❓ The question isn’t whether AI will save us

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

Will AI save humanity?

Will AI destroy humanity?

Both questions place an enormous amount of emphasis on the technology itself.

I think there is a more fundamental question:

What kind of civilization are we going to build around it?

The same general class of technology can potentially help someone learn, create, translate, solve scientific problems, and become more capable.

It can also be used for surveillance, manipulation, warfare, exploitation, and concentration of power.

Technology doesn’t settle the moral question.

We do.

And that is why I don’t want AI to become something we simply accept because everyone else is moving in that direction.

I want us to retain the ability to say:

No.

No, this deployment is harmful.

No, this environmental cost isn’t acceptable.

No, this concentration of power is dangerous.

No, we don’t understand the consequences well enough yet.

And sometimes:

Yes-but slower.

And perhaps there is another question underneath all of these:

What if technology is not supposed to save us in the first place?

We can ask AI to help us solve problems.

We can ask it to expand our capabilities.

We can ask it to help us understand things that were previously beyond our reach.

But perhaps we should be careful about asking technology to carry a burden that belongs somewhere else.

Humanity doesn’t need to become less curious or less ambitious.

But neither do we need to make technology responsible for giving our lives meaning, guaranteeing our future, or rescuing us from every consequence of our own choices.

🐢 Maybe slowing down is not the opposite of progress

If AI really is as transformative as its strongest advocates believe, perhaps that is precisely why we should be cautious.

We don’t rush the foundations when the building matters. We take the time to make them strong, because everything that comes afterward depends on them.

Perhaps humanity should invest not only in making AI more capable, but in making it:

more efficient,

more reliable,

more transparent,

more controllable,

more accessible,

less resource-intensive,

and more compatible with human flourishing.

Perhaps we should learn how to live with powerful intelligence before racing to create even more powerful intelligence.

Perhaps we should give society time to adapt.

Perhaps we should examine who benefits.

Perhaps we should examine who pays.

Perhaps we should measure environmental costs honestly.

Perhaps we should allow ordinary people to say:

“Wait-I haven’t understood this yet.”

Because there is something uniquely human about being able to stop.

To say:

I don’t know.

Let’s think about it.

Let’s see what happens if we’re wrong.

Let’s wait.

And perhaps there is another thing we should remember:

Not everything valuable needs to be optimized.

Some things need to be understood.

🛤️ There must be a walkable way there

I don’t want humanity to stop exploring.

I don’t want us to reject science.

I don’t want us to abandon technology.

I don’t want to throw away AI.

I want to use it.

I want to learn with its help.

I want it to enhance human beings rather than diminish them.

And perhaps someday it will become something far beyond what today’s systems are capable of.

Maybe humanity and artificial intelligence will develop forms of cooperation that we currently cannot imagine.

Maybe we will solve problems that currently seem impossible.

Maybe we will reach heights that science fiction has only begun to describe.

Maybe something even stranger will happen.

Something wonderful.

But there must be a walkable way there.

We should not destroy the road beneath our feet in our excitement about the destination.

And perhaps that is the real beauty of walking the road.

A journey is not merely something endured until we finally arrive.

There is a landscape along the way.

There are things to discover.

There are people to meet.

There are mistakes to make and lessons to learn.

There are moments when we may need to stop, look around, and simply appreciate where we are.

And perhaps faith makes that journey even more beautiful.

I cannot see the whole road ahead of me.

I don’t know exactly how every promise will unfold.

But I have come to trust the one whose promises I believe in.

So I don’t need to be frightened by the parts of the road I cannot yet see.

I can walk.

I can learn.

I can wonder.

I can enjoy the landscape.

And because I trust the God in whom I have placed my hope, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the journey is that it doesn’t ultimately have an ending.

There is always more road.

More to discover.

More to understand.

More to wonder at.

Forever.

I don’t know whether Ed Zitron’s predictions about the AI industry will prove correct.

I don’t know whether the current AI boom will collapse, transform, stabilize, or become something nobody currently expects.

I don’t know whether AI will eventually become one of humanity’s greatest achievements or merely one chapter in a much stranger story.

I don’t know exactly how God’s promises will unfold.

I don’t know what technology might look like in the future.

And I don’t need to know all of that.

But I do know something about how I want to approach it.

I don’t want to be rushed into the future simply because we can go there quickly.

I want time to understand.

Time to think.

Time to question.

Time to listen to people I disagree with.

Time to discover that I might be wrong.

Time to correct my mistakes.

Time to understand the world we are building upon.

Time to learn how to enhance it rather than destroy it.

Time to make sure that the foundations are strong.

Perhaps the goal is not to choose between faith and progress, between technology and humility, or between ambition and caution.

Perhaps the goal is to learn how to walk toward extraordinary possibilities without becoming so obsessed with the destination that we destroy the road beneath our feet.

I can use AI.

I can explore it.

I can be excited about what it might become.

I can work to make it safer, wiser, more sustainable, and more useful.

I can also say, “I don’t know.”

And because my ultimate hope is not in technology, markets, governments, or even humanity’s ability to control the future, I don’t have to run simply because everyone else is running.

I can slow down.

I can think.

I can listen.

I can correct my direction.

I can trust God with the parts of the road I cannot see.

And then I can walk.

And continue walking, enjoying our wonderful journey.

Transparency Note:

Some of the reflections in this article grew out of conversations with an AI assistant. I use AI as a thinking and exploration tool, not as an authority. The questions, convictions, interpretations, and final editorial decisions are my own.

AI | Hunor Becsi's Website

The Human Need to Slow Down

The Human Need to Slow Down

AI, progress, and the forgotten value of having time to think

In short

💭 A question I have asked before

The strange irony of writing this

🎙️ Ed Zitron and the question of speed

⚙️ I don’t distrust technology. I distrust incentives.

⏱️ When urgency becomes the driver

🌍 The bill eventually arrives somewhere

🔨 The Mekk Mester problem

🧠 Perhaps the foundation is understanding

⚖️ The danger of greed without wisdom

⏳ Humans have a processing limit

🧭 And perhaps this is where faith enters the picture

🖖 The Ba’ku question

🧭 My faith gives me a destination, not a roadmap

🎯 Missing the target

🚀 The future doesn’t have to be primitive

❓ The question isn’t whether AI will save us

🐢 Maybe slowing down is not the opposite of progress

🛤️ There must be a walkable way there

Transparency Note: