What AI Will Never Be

That photo you see is from 2009. It was late at night. Quiet, but full. I was supporting the birth of my 500th baby.

There’s something about being in the room when a new life begins that never feels routine. No matter how many times you’ve done it, no matter how practiced your hands are, it stops you. You feel time stretch. You become aware of every breath, every muscle, every pulse. Birth is not efficient. It’s not scalable. It’s not optimized. It’s raw, unpredictable, messy, holy. It requires presence more than precision.

I think about that moment often now, especially in conversations about work, worth, and artificial intelligence.

In 2025, it’s easy to get swept up in the momentum of AI. The tools are powerful. They save time. They remove friction. They’re doing things that once seemed unimaginable. We should absolutely use them for what they can do. Automate the repeatable. Streamline the systems. Build faster, reach further, process more.

But we also need to stay grounded in the difference between what is artificial and what is human.

AI does not attend birth. It does not sit at a deathbed. It does not hold someone’s hand when they are afraid, or tired, or trying to stay brave in the middle of something they did not choose. It does not grieve. It does not wait with someone while they decide who they want to become. And it does not walk with them through the slow, uncertain work of becoming.

These are human things. They happen slowly, in layers, often without words. You know them when you feel them. You know them in your bones.

This matters not just in medicine or caregiving, but in how we show up in the world, especially at work. If you are applying for jobs right now, you might feel the quiet pressure to sound more like a system. More crisp. More perfect. Less messy. Less real.

But AI will never understand what it is to be alive in a body. It will never understand what it means to say goodbye, or to hold a newborn against your chest and feel the weight of both fear and awe at once. It will never carry a lifetime of memory inside a single scent. It will never change because it chose to love someone.

You do those things every day, whether you realize it or not.

So yes, let’s use AI. Let’s use it well. But let’s not confuse usefulness with humanness. Let’s not let the speed of technology rush us out of our own knowing. Let’s not flatten our presence to fit into systems that were never designed to hold our full selves.

The most important parts of being alive have never been the fastest or the most measurable. They are the ones that remind us we are temporary. That we are connected. That we are here, now.

And that matters more than anything a machine will ever write.