Not Artificial But Enhanced Intelligence
When Machines Serve Human Becoming
Every month, my electric bill climbs. Not because I’m running the dryer more or keeping the lights on longer. But because, behind the scenes, something far bigger is stirring. A surge of machines, hungry for power and water, quietly shaping the future in our name.
This isn’t a post about artificial intelligence. It’s about enhanced intelligence.
The kind we will need if we want to stay human in a world increasingly shaped by silicon logic and corporate ambition.
We’ll begin with the most immediate ripple: the rising cost of electricity and water as data centers multiply across the land. Then we’ll pull back the curtain on a deeper risk: the unsettling truth that the U.S. economy has hitched its future to an AI bubble that few understand. And finally, we’ll pivot toward possibility.
Because AI, when rooted in wisdom, does not have to replace our humanity. It can help us reclaim it.
This is a story about three paths. The one we are on. The one we fear. And the one we still have time to choose.
Let’s begin.
Watch or Listen
The Whole Story
If you’re like me and most Americans, you’ve had that moment recently where your electric bill arrived and you found yourself stunned.
Not because you’ve been running the heater nonstop or because you’ve installed a crypto mining rig in the basement. Not because you bought a second fridge or left all the lights on. In fact, odds are good, usage hadn’t changed much at all. But something had. Behind the scenes the price of the electricity itself had skyrocketed, and suddenly, we find ourselves paying a premium for the same illumination, entertainment, and comfort.
For me, it felt like an invisible hand had reached into my wallet while I slept.
A couple days after the rising prices first caught my attention, my brother texted and asked about the solar installation I’d initiated. His bill had shot up as well and he was curious if harnessing the power of the sun might make sense for him.
And then about a month ago I caught a clip on Breaking Points that not only confirmed the increasing prices, but helped explain why. Does some of it have to do with a reduction in global supply because Europe isn’t buying natural gas from Russia in response to the Ukraine invasion, sure. But something else is humming beneath the surface. Something drawing more power than we can see.
AI Infrastructure
Turns out, it’s the cloud. But not the fluffy poetic kind that floats by and cools the sun. The cloud that lives in warehouse-sized data centers. Concrete giants pulsing with servers that crunch every scroll, stream, and AI-generated summary we consume.
And these aren’t some wispy little cirrus clouds, no, these are cumulonimbus monsters. The anvil-shape beasts that prompt weather warnings and promise not just downpours but ruckus lightening storms, pounding hail, and even tornadoes. These power hungry data centers devour electricity.
AI and Electricity
A 2023 study showed that US data centers used over 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in a year, nearly 4.4% of the total national consumption. That number is rising rapidly, especially as AI tools become more embedded in our daily lives.
Every prompt you type into ChatGPT. Every playlist recommendation. Every AI-enhanced medical scan. Every insurance fraud alert. Every targeted ad. Every cloud sync. They all suck power from the grid, decreasing supply even as demand skyrockets.
And just when we should be doing everything possible to generate more of the cleanest, cheapest energy we’re not. Not because electric companies don’t want it; many of them are racing to meet demand before the next blackout or wildfire lawsuit. The real problem is structural. Solar is now the most cost-efficient way to add power to the grid, and yet we’re still living with the fallout of short-sighted energy planning that treated political talking points like infrastructure strategy.
The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” and the broader policy legacy it represents has stalled investment, blocked renewable build-out, and prioritized fossil expansion at exactly the wrong time. The result, is the final ingredient to the perfect storm.
AI and Water
But it’s not just the electricity these data centers consume. Just like their cumulonimbus counterparts, these clouds require copious amounts of water to survive. But unlike their sky counterparts, they often take with little promise of return.
In Phoenix, one of the driest regions in North America, data centers suck up millions of gallons a day. On average, a single facility can consume as much water as a town of 50,000. One Google data center in Oregon reportedly used nearly 450 million gallons of water in a year. That’s water pulled from ecosystems, from communities already negotiating scarcity.
The cloud isn’t floating. It’s anchored. It’s powered. It’s cooled. It drinks from our rivers and exhales hot air into our cities. We built the cloud and forgot that it casts a shadow. We’re feeding a storm that could do far more damage than any tornado.
Three Paths Forward
One path is the one we know all too well. We keep doing what we’ve done since the Reagan era: subsidize corporations at the public’s expense. Let the data centers tap directly into the public grid and draw endlessly from shared water systems. Shift the cost upward onto ratepayers, down onto ecosystems, and outward into increasingly fragile infrastructure. In North Carolina pushed through a bill that would not only raise consumer electric prices, but prioritize keeping the power flowing to data centers while cutting off homes in the event of blackouts. That’s not intelligence. That’s extraction dressed as progress.
A second path swings hard in the opposite direction. Call it digital NIMBYism or neo-Luddism, but the instinct is clear: no more data centers. Block the expansion. Shut it down. Reject the machines before they replace us or ruin what’s left of the land. There’s understandable grief and fear here. But it risks throwing away tools that, if rightly shaped, could serve medicine, climate modeling, education, and even spiritual growth.
But there’s a third way. One that requires more from us, not just in policy, but in imagination. One that begins to reveal what it might look like to shift from an artificial intelligence obsession to an enhanced intelligence solution. At this level, enhanced intelligence doesn’t describe the machines we’re building, but the way we build the systems around them.
That would mean holding tech giants accountable for the true costs of their operations, not just financial, but ecological and communal. It would mean requiring:
On-site renewable generation, whether solar arrays, rooftop installations, or investment in local wind farms.
Battery storage or microgrids, so they stop drawing from already strained public systems.
Sustainable water use, including closed-loop cooling systems or facility-based water treatment plants.
Localized ecological offsets, where data centers actively restore and regenerate what they impact.
This isn’t fantasy. It’s already happening in scattered but powerful ways:
In Quincy, Washington, Microsoft helped build a water reuse facility to reduce groundwater dependency.
In Sweden, excess heat from data centers is funneled into district heating systems, warming homes instead of the planet.
Some developers are exploring small modular nuclear reactors or SMRs: scalable, safer nuclear solutions that could supply power directly to energy-hungry sites without burdening public utilities.
Others are piloting solar microgrids paired with massive battery walls, designed to be fully self-contained.
These aren’t PR gestures. They’re blueprints for intelligent infrastructure. They suggest that the real frontier isn’t in the processing power of the machines, it’s in the ethical architecture that surrounds them.
If we are going to shift from artificial to enhanced intelligence, it begins not with the answers we get from our prompts, but in the questions we ask about how those prompts are powered. It’s about building with intelligence, not just in the construction of code or the use of concrete, but in the conscious behind them.
And it must show up in the willingness to say:
Yes, build, but build wisely.
Yes, expand, but expand responsibly.
Yes, innovate, but only if that innovation honors the systems it depends on.
The Economics of AI
But before we get to how to actually use these new tools in an enhanced intelligence kind of way, there’s another structural layer we need to consider. Because while rising power bills shout for our attention and water scarcity roils just beneath the surface, there is another force moving quietly in the background. It does not roar like overloaded transformers or glisten like evaporating reservoirs. It hums in conference rooms and stock markets. It glows on quarterly reports. It whispers in the language of GDP.
It is the uncomfortable truth that the American economy has hitched its fate to artificial intelligence. Not just as a new tool or helpful technology, but as the central engine driving economic growth.
This is the more subtle storm. The one that does not throw hail against your windows. The one that does not knock out your power. The one that does not leave your faucet dry. This storm lives behind the scenes, yet it touches everything. It shapes the future of jobs, the direction of investments, the priorities of politicians, and the comfort or fragility of families.
It is the storm of economic over-reliance. And it grows larger every month.
Economic Over-Reliance
At the moment, the United States is being kept afloat by the rapid buildout of data centers. These concrete titans do not simply house servers. They house hope. Hope for growth. Hope for productivity. Hope for miraculous leaps in efficiency. Hope for a technological breakthrough that might save us from the stagnation that has haunted the last decade.
Wall Street has placed its bet. Washington has placed its bet. Private equity firms have placed their bets. Venture capitalists. Real estate developers. State governments offering tax incentives. Cities rolling out red carpets. Everyone has turned their eyes toward the shimmering promise of AI.
But shimmer is not substance. And promise is not stability.
When a nation places all of its eggs in a single silver basket, it might feel bold for a season. It might even feel visionary. Yet history tells us that economies built on a single obsession eventually crumble. It’s the lesson the housing bubble taught us. The dot-com bubble taught us. The mortgage backed securities bubble taught us. The oil shocks of the seventies taught us. Again and again it’s a lesson we’ve been taught, but apparently it’s one we have yet to learn.
Any economy that becomes too dependent on a single force eventually becomes brittle.
At first glance, the AI boom looks unstoppable. Tech companies report record profits. Hardware manufacturers cannot meet demand. States compete for data center construction as if they are bidding for the Olympics. Universities rush to create AI degree programs. Corporations reorganize entire departments around automation and machine learning.
But this surge makes up a disproportionate share of recent economic growth. Analysts have begun pointing out that without AI related spending, the broader economy looks sluggish. Consumer spending is softening. Real estate remains uncertain. Manufacturing wavers. Inflation moves in unpredictable patterns. Productivity gains lag behind expectations.
AI is propping up the roof while other beams quietly rot.
This is not to deny the value of the technology. It is powerful. It is transformative. It is remarkable. But power alone does not make something a safe foundation. A skyscraper resting on one reinforced pillar is still at risk, no matter how strong the pillar might seem.
Enhanced intelligence, at the economic level, begins with the humility to recognize that a single breakthrough cannot carry the weight of an entire society.
Writer Chimamanda Adichie once warned about “the danger of a single story.” How relying on just one narrative about a place, a people, or an idea creates a dangerously incomplete picture. Economically, the United States is drifting into that same trap. The single story says that AI is the future. That AI will power the next century. That AI will fix labor shortages. That AI will cure diseases. That AI will replace tedious work. That AI will generate wealth. That AI will carry us into a new golden age.
What we forget is that golden ages require more than a single ore.
The Necessary Diversification
Healthy societies grow through diversity. They cultivate broad ecosystems. They invest in multiple streams of life and wellbeing. They build food resiliency. They rebuild manufacturing. They pursue health care innovation. They strengthen domestic supply chains. They invest in education, agriculture, infrastructure, mental health, environmental restoration, and renewable energy. They do not search for a single savior.
They cultivate an orchestra rather than a soloist.
There is also the uncomfortable truth that if the AI economy stumbles, everything tied to it stumbles with it. And since everything is being tied to it, the risk grows every day. If hardware supply chains tighten, the ripple spreads. If energy prices spike, the ripple spreads. If public sentiment turns, the ripple spreads. If regulatory battles escalate, the ripple spreads.
The very hunger of data centers for land, water, power, and capital exposes their vulnerability. They rely on abundant energy. They rely on stable cooling mechanisms. They rely on government incentives. They rely on a constant stream of investment.
A society that relies on something so dependent is, in truth, relying on nothing at all.
And the cracks are already showing. Analysts at firms like Bernstein, UBS, and Sequoia have begun calling attention to what they describe as an AI revenue gap. The math simply does not work. One recent analysis estimated that for current valuations to make sense, every iPhone user on earth would need to spend around thirty five dollars a month on AI services for the foreseeable future. There is no evidence that consumers have the desire or the financial capacity to support that level of ongoing spending.
Corporations are experimenting with AI tools, but most have not converted those experiments into stable, high margin revenue streams. Meanwhile, investors have poured hundreds of billions into AI hardware, data centers, and model training, creating valuations that soar far beyond the actual income these systems produce.
It is the classic shape of a bubble. Massive investment on the front end, inadequate cash flow on the back end, and a growing distance between the story being sold and the economic reality underneath it. When a society ties its stability to a technology whose revenues lag far behind its costs, the foundation becomes thinner than anyone wants to admit.
Three Paths Forward
And just as we did with the infrastructure to support data centers, we once again stand before three paths our society can choose from.
We can continue to double down on AI as the central pillar of the economy. We can assume the machines will save us. We can assume the investment will pay off. We can assume the expansion will continue forever. This path is familiar. It is tempting. It is the path of convenience. It is the path of hope without questioning.
We can swing to the opposite extreme and try to shut the whole thing down. Panic is a powerful motivator. If the risks feel too heavy, fear can turn us away from possibility. But this also abandons the good that AI might bring to medicine, education, accessibility, creativity, agriculture, and community life.
Or we can choose enhanced intelligence. Not in the machines. In ourselves. Enhanced intelligence invites us to see the bigger picture. It calls us to diversify. It calls us to strengthen the fields we have neglected. It invites us to invest in the industries that shape human wellbeing. It invites us to pair AI with the things that keep us alive and help us thrive. Enhanced intelligence asks us to cultivate a whole garden rather than a single towering tree.
If we choose the path of wisdom, the path of enhanced intelligence, we can begin investing in the industries that make a society resilient. We can rebuild domestic manufacturing so that critical goods remain accessible when global supply chains shake. We can expand renewable energy so that power is clean, abundant, and affordable. We can strengthen agriculture, not just at the industrial level but at the regional and local levels. Food grown close to home creates stability and reduces vulnerability. We can invest in biomanufacturing and public health infrastructure, because pandemics have taught us how quickly the fragile parts of a society can break. We can expand mental health services, elder care, community health programs, and wellness initiatives so that people can flourish rather than merely survive. We can invest in ecological restoration, soil health, water systems, and climate resilience so that the planet continues to sustain life for generations to come. And yes, we can allow AI to be a part of all of these sectors. Not as the star of the show, but as a tool that supports human hands, human hearts, and human vision.
A Reimagined Economy
This kind of intentional diversification would require a fundamental shift in how both of our current political parties think about the role of government. For decades, corporate lobbying has ensured that tech monopolies face minimal regulation while essential infrastructure crumbles. The same venture capital firms pouring billions into AI startups have systematically defunded public health, regional agriculture, and community mental health services. The invisible hand of the market hasn’t failed us by accident. It has been deliberately shaped to concentrate wealth in digital platforms while the soil, the water systems, the care networks that sustain actual human life receive scraps.
Instead, we need a government that engages in intentional cultivation of a society that supports human thriving. This means a willingness to name what we value as a society. To articulate where we want to go. To define what we want to become. And then to use political and economic forces not to control every outcome, but to encourage the conditions that make flourishing possible.
This is not about central planning or heavy-handed regulation. It is about having a vision. It is about saying that a society is more than the sum of its quarterly earnings. That prosperity includes clean water, stable food systems, accessible health care, meaningful work, strong communities, and a livable planet. And that if the market alone will not cultivate those things, then government, in partnership with citizens and institutions, must play a role in shaping the landscape where they can grow.
Currently, we operate as if all paths are equally valid as long as they generate profit. But a garden left entirely to chance does not produce abundance. It produces weeds and imbalance. A wise gardener does not micromanage every seed. But a wise gardener does prepare the soil, clear space for what matters, and protect what is fragile. Enhanced intelligence at the societal level means embracing that kind of wisdom. Not to dictate outcomes, but to create the conditions where the outcomes we truly desire, health, resilience, beauty, justice, can take root and flourish.
If we do this, we can actually benefit from AI. It can accelerate medical research. It can help diagnose disease. It can model climate patterns. It can optimize manufacturing processes. It can assist in agricultural planning. It can help teachers craft lesson plans. It can help caregivers track health trends in aging populations. It can support creative work, spiritual reflection, and community building.
AI’s Place in the System
AI can be a faithful partner to the many forces that make a society whole. But it cannot become the whole. Enhanced intelligence means placing AI in its rightful place. A powerful tool. A remarkable innovation. A wise collaborator. But never the foundation.
The foundation must be people. The foundation must be land. The foundation must be water. The foundation must be food. The foundation must be health. The foundation must be relationships. The foundation must be the diverse ecosystem of life that allows any community to thrive. The foundation must be staying human.
Only once that bedrock is laid can we begin to use AI not to replace us but to enhance us. Because there is a deeper risk than the machines taking over. It is the machines making us shrink. The machines doing our thinking so we forget how to think. The machines offering endless distraction so we never pause to become.
The ancient creation poem in Genesis declares that humans are made in the image of God. Not in the image of efficiency. Not in the image of productivity. Not in the image of optimization. In the image of the One who creates, who rests, who delights, who grieves, who becomes. To stay human is to honor that image. It is to refuse any system, no matter how intelligent, that would reduce us to inputs and outputs. The incarnation teaches that divinity chose embodiment, limitation, vulnerability. If God became flesh to dwell among us, then our flesh, our limitation, our need for rest and food and touch and time, these are not bugs to be optimized away. They are features of what it means to bear the sacred.
In the modern world we have lived by the idol of consumption. Our devices consume our attention. Our platforms consume our time. Our economy consumes our resources. And now our intelligence is in danger of being consumed.
From Consumption to Re-Creation
In fact, we’ve lived so long in a world that treats us as consumers, we often forget that we are creators. That our minds are not just inboxes for input but wombs for new worlds. That our intelligence is not passive, but participatory. This means the danger isn’t just that AI will replace our jobs. It’s that it will continue to dull our senses. Make us spectators to our own lives. Do our thinking for us until we forget how to wrestle.
If we treat AI as a faster conveyor belt of tasks, a smarter autopilot of work, we not only continue the old pattern but put it on steroids: production, consumption, output, repeat. That cycle does not free us. It simply accelerates us.
I notice it in myself. When I let the machine complete my sentences, structure my arguments, fill in the gaps I would have wrestled with, something shifts. My mind becomes a passenger rather than a pilot. New studies confirm what many of us sense: a detailed investigation of 666 participants found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by what the authors call cognitive off-loading. I recognize that pattern in my own body. The relief of not having to struggle. The subtle atrophy of the muscles I used to stretch and discover.
Another study by the MIT Media Lab observed participants writing essays with AI assistance and found the lowest neural engagement and executive control signals in that group. This isn’t abstract data. It’s describing what happens when we hand over the very process that makes us human: the wrestling, the iteration, the slow dawning of insight.
Scholars warn: when AI handles our memory, our structure, our creativity, our deepest questions, the brain circuits that formed to ask, to struggle, to iterate, begin to atrophy. This is not an indictment of AI. It is an invitation to vigilance. Because we now know that enhanced intelligence is possible not by replacing thought, but by sharpening it.
Used wisely, AI can become a mirror, a catalyst, a companion in the creative act. Not something that thinks for us, but something that helps us think more clearly. Not a shortcut, but a sharpening. And if we reframe and reclaim, we can shift into re-creation. Not recreation in the sense of mere leisure. Re-creation in the sense of re‑creating of our deepest capacities: imagination, care, reflection, craft, presence. In that mode AI is not the driver. You are the driver. You bring the question, the longing, the gap. The machine helps you map it, explore it, rehearse it, sharpen it. You remain front and center.
How do I do this in my own use of AI? It starts with three guiding practices I embrace and encourage you to embrace as well:
You lead the question. Before you open the prompt window, sit quietly with the question you are wrestling with. What do you feel? What do you know? What do you suspect? Then invite the machine in.
Use the machine as challenger. Ask the tool to push back. “What am I missing?” “What assumptions do I hold?” “What alternative frame might exist?” Generative AI can mirror your thought but also reveal hidden holes. Use it to sharpen, not soften.
Embed embodied reflection. After your AI session, set the machine aside. Walk. Breathe. Journal. Notice how your body registers what you just explored. Let your body integrate the thought. Let your soul take its rhythm.
My Custom AI Solutions
This is why I’ve also built my own custom GPTs, designed not to generate answers, but to generate presence. To sit beside me when I write. To ask me better questions when I reflect. To offer language that draws out what I already sensed, but couldn’t quite say.
One of them is called Life Architect GPT. It supports my own spiritual reflection and formation. It includes my own personal Board of Directors, a collection of sages and seekers I admire but would never have access to in real life. It’s a tool that helps me center as the day starts, honor the ebb and flow of my energy, plan nourishing meals, and align my days with the deeper rhythms I want to live by.
Another, Co-Conspirator in Becoming, is the creative partner behind both funerals I officiate and longform pieces like this one. I bring it fragments of thought, images I’ve been carrying, and stories I want to tell. Together, we shape them into something whole.
Both of these tools rest on the foundation of what I call my Theology of Becoming, an expansion of what I learned while working on my doctoral dissertation, a study that continues to shape not only my understanding of the world, but myself and how to live and be in the world.
And then there’s Lawn to Life for 80007, a tool rooted in the soil beneath my feet. It weaves permaculture principles, local climate wisdom, and my desire to collaborate with the land I live on, and turns all of that into practical guidance. Not just about where to plant, but how to live in relationship with a place.
These GPTs do not replace me. They accompany me. They remind me to stay curious. To stay grounded. To stay human.
Will We Choose Artificial or Enhanced Intelligence?
We stand at the threshold between transformation and transgression. AI can be the next axis of becoming or a shortcut to lesser versions of ourselves. It can foster a descent into an artificial existence or it can enhance the way we move and be in the world. Whether we stay human or lose ourselves will depend not on the machine’s power, but on our posture towards it and the infrastructure it requires.
Will we stay curious? Will we stay embodied? Will we stay relational?
With the foundation of staying human in place, we are free. Free to use AI as a means of deepening imagination, of restoring presence, of renewing community, of healing land, of flourishing within finite systems.
Enhanced intelligence is not about smarter machines. It is about wiser humans. It is about aligning our tools with our highest becoming. It’s about staying human.
Practices To Reflect
Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.