But as I read, for the second time, MEA faculty member Dacher Keltner’s “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” I found myself wondering: can AI ever feel awe? Or even better — can it inspire it?
Dacher identifies eight pathways to awe: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality, life and death, and epiphanies of understanding. Each one is a portal to humility and connection — the antidote to ego inflation. But what happens when we run those eight through the algorithm?
Let’s test the circuitry, starting from the top: the quality that is most commonly associated with awe in the world, all the way to what came in 8th place.
1. Moral Beauty: When we witness ordinary people doing extraordinary good — kindness, courage, compassion — we feel awe. AI can simulate moral beauty (think: stories of heroism written by ChatGPT), but can it embody it? Hardly. Until machines make sacrifices that cost them something real, moral beauty remains beautifully human.
2. Collective Effervescence: That electric sense of unity at a concert, a march, or even a neighborhood potluck. AI can organize us, but it can’t sway with us. It has no heartbeat to sync.
3. Nature: The rustle of aspens, the vastness of the desert sky. AI can describe it, even generate a high-res image of it, but it can’t smell the rain or feel small beneath a redwood. (And that smallness — that ego shrinkage — is the point.)
4. Music: AI can compose, remix, and even mimic human emotion. But the goosebumps that come from a slightly flat saxophone note or a singer’s crack of vulnerability? That’s imperfection as transcendence — something AI still can’t fake well. But, I will give AI credit for getting this pathway to awe close to correct.
5. Visual Design: Here, AI holds its own. Midjourney and DALL·E can spark real awe through novelty and beauty. But that awe is still borrowed — a reflection of the human imagination that trained it.
6. Spirituality: Algorithms don’t meditate or surrender. They can quote Rumi, but they can’t dissolve into oneness.
7. Life and Death: AI doesn’t die. It doesn’t mourn. It doesn’t hold a loved one’s hand at the end of life — or feel the strange gratitude that sometimes comes with grief.
8. Epiphanies of Understanding: Here’s where AI can inspire awe — when it helps us see patterns too vast for our brains to hold. That’s real intellectual awe, the kind Einstein might’ve felt staring into his equations.
So yes, AI can help us find awe — but it can’t feel awe. It can illuminate meaning, but not live it.
Maybe that’s the emerging divide: AI is brilliant at generating information; humans are still the masters of transformation. I’ll give AI credit for three of these pathways – Music, Visual Design, and Big Ideas (Epiphanies of Understanding), but that’s far fewer pathways than we typically experience in an MEA workshop.
What’s categorically true is that I’ll never believe that my AI has Moral Beauty. This is a quality, in all its human complexity, that is reserved for those with blood running through their veins. Moral beauty is what happens when goodness takes our breath away. It’s the awe we feel watching someone act with courage, compassion, or integrity—especially when there’s nothing in it for them. In a world obsessed with status and self-promotion, moral beauty recenters us on what truly matters: the quiet, luminous power of empathy. It reminds us that goodness isn’t naive; it’s contagious—and witnessing it makes us want to be better humans ourselves. Not better robots.
-Chip