As generative AI increasingly becomes part of our daily lives, we’re invited into deeper questions than we might expect: not just what these tools can do, but what kind of spirit they carry — and what they reveal about us in return. Every technology has a spirit, discovered only through relationship with it: through curiosity and resistance, wonder and critique, engagement and restraint. And our deepest stories quietly shape us — stories about what will save us, what will end us, and what it means to be human in the first place.

So what does it mean to stay human in an age when our tools can sound so very… human? When does easing the path support learning, and when does growth still ask us to wrestle? Some traditions teach that we learn through friction; others point us toward wu-wei — effortless effort, alignment rather than strain. Meanwhile, we’re encouraged to be vulnerable, even as we’re rarely taught how to do that with dignity, safety, and agency. AI (as Trickster?) has entered this already complicated terrain, offering both new possibilities for connection and revelation as well as new risks of confusion and conflation.

How can our technologies reveal us to ourselves? With courage, care, and shared responsibility, we’ll ask how to engage these tools not with fear or naïveté, but with discernment, perhaps learning ourselves more deeply along the way.