Sometimes it's just nice to share thoughts and musings.
Artificial intelligence is becoming the oracle of our age. It’s fast, confident, and increasingly embedded in every part of life. But there’s a growing question we need to ask as humans:
Can AI experience awe? And more importantly — can it create awe?
If you watched our Thrive 25 Lifestyle Investing workshop earlier in the year you'll remember we talk about Awe quite a lot.
Because as a novel experience it slows down time.
Dacher Keltner identifies eight pathways that trigger awe in people. They’re the ingredients that expand our perspective, dissolve our ego, and reconnect us to meaning. When you layer AI across those eight pathways, a clear pattern emerges.
Here’s the breakdown.
Moral Beauty
Awe often begins when we witness someone doing good at personal cost — courage, sacrifice, compassion. AI can generate stories about moral beauty, but it cannot embody it. Machines don’t make sacrifices. Humans do.
This is the realm of character, not code.
Collective Effervescence
The energy of being in a crowd that’s united — a concert, a movement, a shared mission. AI can coordinate people, but it can’t join the experience. It doesn’t have a pulse to sync with everyone else.
Nature
Standing under redwoods, hearing the ocean, feeling the scale of mountains. AI can illustrate it, but it can’t feel small in the presence of something greater. And that humility is the whole point.
Music
AI can compose, remix, and analyse music brilliantly. But the magic of music is often in the imperfections — the breath in the singer’s voice or the imperfect timing that carries emotion. AI gets close here, but it’s still imitation, not embodiment.
Visual Design
This is where AI shines. Tools like Midjourney or DALL·E can create visuals that genuinely spark awe. But even then, the raw material comes from the human imagination that trained the system.
Spirituality
AI can quote Rumi, but it can’t dissolve its ego, feel presence, or seek transcendence. There’s no inner world to awaken.
Life and Death
AI doesn’t age, lose loved ones, or sit by a bedside in the final moments. It doesn’t grieve or grow from grief. This pathway is exclusively human.
Epiphanies of Understanding
This is where AI truly contributes. It can reveal patterns and insights we’d never see alone. It can spark intellectual awe, the “Einstein moment” where everything clicks.
The Real Divide
AI is exceptional at generating information. Humans remain the masters of transformation.
Of the eight pathways, AI currently supports only three:
Music (partially)
Visual Design
Big Ideas (epiphanies of understanding)
The rest require lived experience, vulnerability, and consciousness.
Why Moral Beauty Will Always Be Human
Moral beauty is the one quality AI will never possess. It’s the awe we feel when someone acts with courage, integrity, or empathy — especially when there’s no reward for doing so.
It’s the kind of behaviour that makes us want to be better humans, not better machines.
And in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, moral beauty might be our most powerful competitive advantage as humans.
So stay human.
Becoming a sovereign version of ourself allows us the luxury to explore this kind of behaviour with more focus. Itmeans that focus becomes laser like because we can pursue more meaningful things to do with our time.
The chase of 'financial freedom' is more important than ever in the pursuit of creativity, awe, and staying human