AI can process, predict, and perform — but it cannot genuinely feel compassion, commune spiritually, or exercise free will. Dr. Brian Arnold, former world-class athlete turned chaplain and author of Relationship vs. AI, argues that human relationships are not just valuable in the age of AI — they are irreplaceable.
You won’t hear a hospital chaplain say this very often: “I have the best job in this building.”
Dr. Brian Arnold said exactly that to patients during his 11 years serving at a Colorado hospital. Not the doctor. Not the surgeon. The chaplain. His reasoning was simple and devastating in its clarity: “I can’t fix you. I can’t give you a sponge bath. But I can be your friend.”
That’s the thing AI cannot replicate. NOT yet. Maybe not ever.
David recently sat down with Dr. B — former world-class hurdler, leadership consultant, ordained minister, and author — on the show. We set out to talk about staying human in the age of AI. What we actually did was ask a lot of hard questions neither of us could fully answer. That felt right.
Compassion Lives in a Different Room Than Code
Here’s what struck me most from our conversation. Dr. Arnold described visiting patients who were completely alone. Someone far from home. A motorcycle accident in Colorado, family back in Ohio, 30 to 45 days of rehab ahead of them. Nobody coming.
Then there was the patient who had a stroke, could see his phone from across the room, and lay there for over 72 hours before anyone found him.
Can you program a robot to sit with that kind of pain?
Technically, maybe. Companies are already experimenting with AI companions for lonely patients. And Dr. B acknowledged there’s a version of that which helps — something to talk to when there’s no one else. But he drew a hard line at prayer. “Is the robot going to be able to talk to God on our behalf? Probably not.”
I’d push that line even further. Empathy doesn’t live in the rational, analytical part of the brain. Compassion isn’t logical. It’s not a sequence of steps. You can train an AI to imitate the language of empathy — and some do it convincingly. But imitation and experience are NOT the same thing.
Information Is Not Wisdom. This Matters More Than You Think.
A late teacher of mine (through his recorded lectures) — J. Rufus Fears of the University of Oklahoma — put it this way: Information is what you find on the internet. Knowledge is the synthesis of information. Wisdom is the application of knowledge.
We’ve built machines that are extraordinary at information. Genuinely breathtaking. Dr. B made the point that all of us could walk onto the Jeopardy stage with our phones and get every question right. The Jeopardy champion of the 1990s was a hero because they had memorized more than everyone else. That’s almost quaint now.
But synthesis? Wisdom? That’s still on us.
Dr. Arnold’s challenge to every listener — and I’m passing it to you — was this: the next time you use AI, don’t just take the output and run. Ask the harder question underneath it. Not “how do I get promoted?” but “how do I serve others through this?” Not “what’s the fastest path?” but “what’s the wisest one?”
The AI gives you information. You have to bring the wisdom.
Free Will Is the Thing We Can’t Upload
Here’s where our conversation got genuinely philosophical — and I mean that in the best way.
Dr. B argued that free will is the one thing humans can give AI parameters around, but never truly hand over. You can program a robot to choose between Option A and Option B. But have you given it the desire to choose? The soul behind the decision?
His reference to Star Trek’s Data was perfect. Data spent entire seasons trying to become human. He never quite got there. Not because he lacked intelligence — he was smarter than everyone on the ship — but because intelligence without feeling is just computation.
My father used to say: just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should do a thing. That’s a moral framework. You can’t write that into code without first having it in yourself.
What You Can Do Starting Today
Use AI. It’s not going anywhere, and refusing it won’t make you more human — it’ll just make you less informed.
But bring yourself to it. Your values. Your judgment. Your relationships. The wisdom literature — the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Sutras — was grappling with questions about human purpose and moral living long before the first algorithm existed. That thinking is still available to you.
We encourage you to ask one better question the next time you open a chat window: What would the wise version of me do with this answer?
That’s the question no AI can answer for you.
Dr. Brian Arnold’s book, Relationship vs. AI: How to Stay Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is available at brianearnold.com. His daily devotional, The Routine, streams live every morning at theroutine.live.
