What we must remember so that “magnificent humanity” is not consumed by AI
Resistance is futile?
Monday, July 27, 2026
* Ana Rodriguez Soto
Does anyone remember The Borg?
Absolutely, if you’re a Trekkie. But for the uninitiated to Star Trek, The Borg are the most terrifying enemy of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (played by Sir Patrick Stewart) in the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. (They also appear in the Voyager series and in a Next Generation movie.) The Borg are the ultimate fighting machine in that they literally absorb all the advanced life forms in the universe into their spaceship “cubes” and turn them into automatons.
Once assimilated – via a gruesome process of injecting nanotechnology and replacing some body parts with superior robotics – these cyber beings become part of a “collective” – “drones” that are literally plugged into each other, forming a “hive” that is constantly communicating, with each drone performing a particular task. Their advanced technology and ability to think as one make them endlessly adaptable. Whatever weapons others use against them, The Borg find a counter after the first few volleys.
Their goal, as they travel through the galaxies, is to assimilate entire species and civilizations, especially their technology, thereby achieving “perfection.” Their mantra: “Resistance is futile.”
I remember reflecting, when I first watched these Borg episodes back in the early 1990s – way before smartphones and social media – that The Borg could be considered a cautionary tale about modern life: how we can be consumed, figuratively, by our technology; how the things we possess, in many ways, ultimately possess us.
I wasn’t thinking back then about social media and artificial intelligence. But aren’t The Borg an even more apt metaphor for our relationship with technology in the 21st century? Think about how most of us feel when we walk out of our homes without our phones. How we blindly rely on GPS to tell us where we’re going. How we spend hours and hours “doomscrolling,” as they say, through Instagram and Facebook posts, or news items and videos. We ask, and Google or Siri answers. We look things up and click on links that lead us to other things. Even our house lights, plugged into Alexa, respond to our commands.
I’m speaking for myself here. I have to fight a feeling of panic if I find myself without my phone. I sit on my sofa at night just to “glance” at Facebook or Instagram and wind up spending far longer than I intended, sacrificing badly needed sleep in the process. It seems I can’t help myself.
“Resistance is futile.”
Not to mention the groupthink tendencies spawned by the algorithms of social media. Tell me whether you post on X or BlueSky and I will divine your political leanings. Tell me you post on Facebook and I can guess your age. Algorithms keep us tethered to the same “collective,” feeding us more and more of the content we click on, be it music on Spotify, ads on Amazon, or news on Google. Doesn’t that “echo chamber” resemble The Borg cube?
And now, here comes artificial intelligence, with its promise and its threat. AI will help us find cures for cancer, we are told. And that’s probably correct. But AI also will replace human workers, we are warned, for it’s a workforce that performs 24/7, without lunch breaks, wages, retirement benefits or health insurance. Like The Borg, it is a most efficient machine: a web of data centers constantly learning, improving itself, and perfecting itself.
Bent on perfection, AI might even develop a consciousness that places it beyond human control, learning and adapting to the point that, some doomsayers predict, it could destroy humanity to save itself.
“Resistance is futile.”
History probably will prove both the optimists and the pessimists only partially right, as has happened with most new technologies. Remember, as a child, being warned that watching too much television would damage your eyesight? Or, on the opposite side, those who predicted television would become an edifying tool for all humanity? Similar predictions were made about social media uniting the world – which, in a way, it has done, but not always for the right reasons or with the most uplifting results.
In essence, technology is what we make of it, and it embodies the characteristics of the humans who created it: saints and sinners, grifters and do-gooders, gossipers and prophets.
Pope Leo XIV writes about this in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. He doesn’t mention The Borg, of course, but he does write against the tendency “to foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an ‘enhanced human being’ or ‘human-machine hybrid.’” (#115) He also warns against technology that reduces creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency. (#92)
When Pope Leo writes about “magnificent humanity,” he is asking us to reflect, in a way, on what makes us human (also a theme throughout the various Star Trek series). The Bible tells us we were created “in God’s image and likeness.” That is, with the desire and ability to love and create. In fact, Pope Leo writes, “technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation.” (#111)
Wow! What a gift.
Humans seek love, and create other humans by consummating that love. Imprinted by our Creator with a yearning for eternity, we are ever restless, ever planning for tomorrow, ever searching for answers, ever journeying toward the unknown (“where no man has gone before”).
And what a burden.
Just as God created humans with free will – and watches us constantly use it to thwart his will for us – AI is our creation. There is no AI without humanity – and neither should there be, if you grasp my whole meaning.
That’s the point Pope Leo is making: “... humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed. We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.” (#126)
We can turn off our cell phones, even if ever so briefly, stop scrolling, and engage in real conversations with our fellow human beings. We can turn off the GPS once in a while and get lost in a different neighborhood. (And didn’t those magnificent videos of foreigners visiting here for the World Cup remind us of the wonder of that?)
Our intelligence created AI and our imagination created The Borg: promise and threat, light and darkness. Humans have – albeit imperfectly, in fits and starts, throughout history – defeated disease, alleviated poverty, negotiated peace, and prevailed against injustice.
AI is no different. Picard ultimately defeated The Borg. As long as we remember who we are – created in the magnificent image and likeness of God – resistance is not futile.
