On 29 January 2026, I (Brian Kemple) gave the annual Aquinas Lecture at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This lecture, including Q&A, was recorded and is now available online.
Aquinas College – Grand Rapids, MI
Aquinas Lecture
Broken Minds
Artificial Intelligence, Digital Technology, and the Enslavement of Humankind
ABSTRACT: Contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence and digital technology often assume that machines threaten humanity by becoming too powerful. This lecture argues instead that the deeper danger lies in a widespread misunderstanding of the human person. Modern technological culture increasingly treats the mind as a mechanism to be optimized, managed, and externalized. This unthinking assumption reshapes our habits, education, and self-understanding in the direction of self-imposed slavery. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, the lecture distinguishes the acts of mind from those of a computer, the pursuit of efficiency from that of wisdom, and the search for optimization from genuine human flourishing. Technology is not rejected as unnatural but situated within a broader account of habit (habitus) as the way human beings hold themselves toward the world. When technologies displace rather than support this formation, they risk fragmenting attention, judgment, and responsibility. By observing the priority of certain practical conditions—educational, linguistic, and communal—we may integrate technology without surrendering the integrity of the human mind.
Watch on YouTube.
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