What AI reveals about intelligence, love and humanity

Professor Jordan Wales on Augustine’s ordo amoris, medieval tales of artificial beings, and what they reveal about the limits of machines

In a culture that increasingly oscillates between two extremes: seeing artificial intelligence as either a salvific technological deus ex machina or an apocalyptic end to humanity, Jordan Wales offers something more serious: a framework for understanding AI in relation to a richer account of what a human being is.

Jordan is Associate Professor and John and Helen Kuczmarski Chair in Theology at Hillsdale College and an advisor to the Holy See’s Center for Digital Culture. To Jordan, before we ask whether AI is a messiah or Skynet, we should understand what the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence is—and what it is for. (Watch my interview here.)

Those are questions as old as civilization itself. Long before technologists set out to create intelligent machines, humanity had wrestled with the nature of intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. From the Garden of Eden onward, the central question has never simply been how to acquire knowledge, but what knowledge is for. Augustine of Hippo gave one of Christianity’s most longstanding answers: wisdom is found not in possessing more information, but in rightly ordering our loves.

Drawing heavily on Augustine, Jordan argues that intelligence is inseparable from love. For Augustine, the fourth-century theologian and philosopher who helped shape Western Christian thought, intelligence is not merely the ability to process information. It is intelligentia—a deeper form of engaging with reality as it truly is.

Jordan illustrates this distinction through the example of a child learning math. At first, math can feel like a set of abstract rules to manipulate symbols: borrow here, carry there, apply the formula, arrive at the answer. A student can follow these procedures without grasping the deeper reality the symbols represent. This is detached calculation or computational intelligence. But Augustine’s framework distinguishes between using knowledge to accomplish a task and truly understanding what that knowledge reveals.

For Jordan, calculus was the moment mathematics became meaningful. The symbols stopped feeling like arbitrary marks on a page and began pointing toward something real—something almost musical in its beauty and order. The equations were no longer merely rules to produce an answer; they became windows into reality itself. For Augustine, true understanding is never purely neutral or detached. We do not fully know something simply by mastering it or extracting its usefulness. We understand it by appreciating it—by loving it, in some sense, for what it is rather than what it can do for us.

Consider mundane objects of everyday life—pens or pencils, for instance. “Pens can become mediators of one’s own self-understanding,” said Jordan. “A pen is not just a pen but an unconscious talisman of me.” And even if a pen or pencil is not a talisman and just something to throw away (like the dozens of tiny golf pencils I lose after using on the golf course), loving a pen can simply mean knowing the objects place in a beautifully ordered universe.

Intelligence is relational

This is the deeper insight behind Augustine’s intelligentia: understanding is begotten in love. Intelligence is not merely computational or transactional; it is relational. We come to know things more fully when we apprehend their meaning and their place within the larger order of reality.

That insight leads directly to one of Augustine’s most important ideas: ordo amoris, the ordering of our loves. Humans are not simply creatures who think or who love; we are rational beings whose reason is directed by what we love. This is not a trivial characteristic of man. We are always directing our attention and devotion toward that which we love, whether that love is aimed toward something genuinely good or toward an appealing desire which seems good in the moment. Those loves shape the kind of people we become. The question is not whether we will love something, but whether our loves are rightly ordered.

And if intelligence is shaped by what we love and how those loves are ordered, then artificial intelligence can only reflect that ordering by the people who design, train and deploy it. The question of AI, then, is not simply how many problems machines can solve or how convincingly it can imitate human thought. It is what vision of the “good” is being modeled. Every technology reflects an implicit hierarchy of values.

But here’s where we reach an unbridgeable gap. Values can be programmed. Objectives can be optimized. Preferences can be ranked. Love, however, cannot. This raises the deepest question of all: How can there be an ordo amoris in a machine incapable of loving?

This paradox becomes clearer when viewed through older literary imaginations of artifice and order, which came up when I brought up the necessity of suffering as part of the human condition to build character. Jordan points to the Roman de Troie (Romance of Troy), a 12th-century medieval French poem, and one of its most memorable scenes: the “Hall of Beauties,” a chamber filled with automata—mechanical figures that stage an idealized social order.

One figure, a woman made of gold, holds up a mirror, offering an image of beauty and proper conduct. Another performs acrobatics to entertain and gather people together. Another plays music, lifting the room into a kind of choreographed harmony. These machines do not replace humans; they serve as symbolic participants within a larger human community. They model how people ought to look, behave, and relate to one another.

In that sense, the scene feels strikingly modern. Today’s robots and AI companions are often sold in much the same way: as guides, helpers, simulators of ideal care, ideal attentiveness, ideal friendship. But simulation is not participation. These machines don’t inhabit the real world, which is messy and full of suffering, grief, sacrifice and yes love. That is the deep irony of the scene appearing in a Trojan story. The city can create these beautiful automota, but outside the room, human nature is still human nature. Troy, and all its artificial beauty and harmony, is still headed for ruin.

This story offers a couple warnings: if we become so enamored with the beauty of a superficial ideal, we constrain ourselves from not seeing reality itself. Worse yet, we fail to cultivate the habits, virtues, and resilience needed to meet reality when it inevitably confronts us. Beauty without truth becomes illusion; comfort without sacrifice leaves us unprepared for life as it truly is.

Then Jordan presents another medieval story that functions as a kind of didactic synthesis of medieval motifs surrounding the Tristan and Ysolt tradition. In his telling, Tristan compels a skilled giant to construct an artificial version of Ysolt and her maidservant. Tristan attempts to direct his love toward the artificial Ysolt, but because she cannot reciprocate—the automaton lacks the essential quality that makes love possible—the interaction produces frustration rather than fulfillment.

Caerdin, Tristan’s brother-in-law, is a parallel figure in this narrative framework. When Caerdin encounters the artificial maidservant, he too realizes the emptiness of a fabricated relationship. Instead of accepting the limits of the robot, however, he turns to the real maidservant, seduces her, and abandons her. Unlike Tristan who becomes frustrated, Caerdin becomes cruel.

The story offers a warning that remains strikingly relevant in the age of AI companions. Attempts to externalize or mechanize our deepest relational desires may produce convincing simulations, but they cannot produce genuine relationship. An imitation may reflect what we long for, but it cannot love us in return. Nor can it demand anything from us.

Giving ourselves away

This is precisely what makes AI companionship so seductive. It promises a companion who is always available, endlessly affirming, and never taxing. Yet the very convenience that attracts us ultimately hollows out the relationship. Human love is not fulfilled simply by being loved—or by feeling understood or affirmed—but by being asked to love. We are made not only to receive affection but to give ourselves away. A companion that requires nothing from us can never occupy the highest place in our hierarchy of loves because it neither gives nor receives love in the fullest sense.

I just came back from the beach with my chocolate lab who’s loved swimming since she was eight weeks old. In the past, she could fetch a tennis ball in the water for hours. So relentless was her energy, we joked how it would be nice if just became old, sat around and made no demands for yet another throw.

This time it was different. She wasn’t feeling herself and for three days she lay curled inside in a blanket. It was nice to pet her. She became a bit of a stuffed animal. Docile, well-behaved. No longer did I have to throw a ball to keep her entertained. I could enjoy my day.

But it wasn’t the same. Even the beach wasn’t the same. Part of what made the ocean beautiful was watching the sheer delight it awakened in her. Yes, throwing the ball could become exhausting—even irritating. But her joy transformed the labor into something meaningful. The effort was not an obstacle to love; it was one of the ways love was expressed.

As humans, we experience reality and relationships not through maximum convenience but through relationships that ask something of us. Love that enables others to glow. Love that exercises us physically and mentally—to put in the work, the sacrifice, the suffering if you will, that brings joy to others. In giving ourselves away, we grow in character, wisdom, and ultimately in love itself.

Artificial intelligence, then, is not just forcing us to ask whether machines can be become super intelligent. Rather it is asking what is human intelligence itself? If intelligence is inseparable from rightly ordered love—recognizing what is good and giving ourselves to it—then this is far deeper and essential than computation, calculation and prediction.

This is why the experiences of Tristan and Caerdin matter. Their frustration did not arise because the automata failed to imitate affection convincingly enough. It arose because an imitation can never become a beloved. Resentment emerged because their relationships were never ever mutual to begin with.

The capacities and skills that enable machines to optimize are extraordinary. But they are not, the measure of intelligence, and they are certainly not the measure of our humanity. Love cannot be computed. Sacrifice and the character borne out of it cannot be generated by algorithm.

That is why the most profound questions surrounding AI are ultimately theological ones because every society organizes itself around its highest good and every technology embodies the values of those who create and use it.

The question is not merely what will AI become.

The question is what will we love—for in the end, we become what we love.

(Image source: ChatGPT)