🧠 How AI Rewires Our Sense of Awe

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 📖What’s Awe?

• ⏳A Brief History of Awe

• 💥Does AI Kill or Spark Awe?

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 7 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Generative AI (GenAI): Creates entirely new content that replicates human-like creativity.

• Large Language Models (LLMs): AI Models pre-trained on vast amounts of high-quality datasets to generate human-like text.

• Industrial Revolution: A period of major technological advancements starting in the 1760s that shifted societies to machine-driven manufacturing.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

We live for moments of awe: the kind that fractures routine and collapses ego. It reminds us there’s more to see, more to know, and more to become.

For example, industrialists built dams, bridges, and skyscrapers. These marvels of steel and concrete defied nature’s limits and redefined what humanity could achieve. In other words, they stood as bold statements of progress by harnessing rivers, merging lands, and conquering skies.

GenAI is poised to usher in a new era of awe that challenges us to rethink creativity, knowledge, and expression. It also forces us to contemplate: Is GenAI a natural development or a cause for concern?

📖WHAT’S AWE?

⦿ 1️⃣ Emotional Roulette?

In 1980, American psychologist Robert Plutchik developed the “Wheel of Emotions,” a circular map of eight core feelings: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. This circular map arranges these eight core feelings in opposing pairs:

• 🟡 Joy ←→ Sadness

• 🔵 Trust ←→ Disgust

• 🔴 Fear ←→ Anger

• 🟠 Surprise ←→ Anticipation

Emotions near the center are intense (e.g., rage, terror, and ecstasy), while those near the edges are mild (e.g., serenity, apprehension, and annoyance).

Each emotion can vary in intensity (e.g., annoyance → anger → rage), and adjacent emotions can combine to create more complex emotional states (e.g., Joy + Trust = Love).

The “Wheel of Emotions” helps visualize how feelings are interconnected, continuously shifting, and constantly blending.

⦿ 2️⃣ Where Does Awe Sit?

Awe sits at the crossroads of fear and surprise, combining the intensity of fear with the openness of surprise. It’s not simply pleasant or unpleasant. Instead, it shifts the way we see things.

In simpler terms, when we face something vast, we feel like we can’t comprehend what we’re looking at. It’s a perception of vastness that transcends existing mental frameworks. Awe humbles the ego, stretches our imagination, and turns attention outward.

⏳A BRIEF HISTORY OF AWE

⦿ 3️⃣ From Early Humans to Medieval Times

Hunter-gatherers often lived in a world illuminated by animism: the belief that all things, such as rivers, mountains, and animals, possess a spiritual essence. Awe served as a survival engine, compelling them to pause, observe, and respect forces beyond their control.

As civilization developed, humans remained in awe of forces beyond their control, gradually shifting their focus from nature toward religion. In Ancient Egypt, the Pyramids of Giza served as tombs for god-like kings and aligned with the stars to reflect principles of balance and morality that governed the universe (i.e., “ma’at”). For instance, the star shafts embodied the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth, linking the heavens with the rhythms of the cosmos.

In medieval France, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres (i.e., “Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres”) stood as a towering testament to a sense of divine ascent, drawing spirits heavenward. The structural alignment and architectural geometry symbolized an ordered universe governed by divine logic. For instance, the pointed arches represented the transition from the earthly to the sacred, inviting worshippers to cross the mundane into a holy realm.

Across continents and millennia, civilizations have constructed their own axes connecting the human and the infinite. By the dawn of the Industrial Age, that same impulse to build beyond comprehension shifted from stone to steel, giving rise to what historians call the technological sublime: awe directed toward human invention itself.

⦿ 4️⃣ Industrial Times

By the late 19th century, spectators were weeping not at religious monuments but at industrial infrastructure. Famed English novelist Charles Dickens admitted of rail lines: “I can’t read, I can’t think....I can only dream,” describing the disorienting power of travel by train.

American historian David E. Nye traced how, in early 20th-century America, the sublime gradually shifted from nature to industrial ability as the locus of wonder. For instance, the soaring verticality of the Empire State Building led observers to describe it as an “artificial mountain.”

By the 1970s, sources of awe shifted from the spectacle of industrial grandeur to the hidden power of computation. When American engineer Douglas Engelbart unveiled the first computer mouse in 1968, people gasped as he effortlessly rearranged digital files. At the time, it felt like witnessing human thought externalized.

By the 1990s, the digital sublime emerged. Email became widespread, captivating everyone by offering fast, accurate, and affordable digital communication. AOL Chat Rooms connected strangers from across the globe. GeoCities gave anyone the ability to share webpages filled with personal stories. Awe was about feeling the boundaries of distance dissolve.

💥DOES AI KILL OR SPARK AWE?

⦿ 5️⃣ How It Went?

Think back to the first time you used ChatGPT. Was it out of curiosity? Maybe you saw a viral social media post or heard a friend raving about it. So, you pulled it up and crafted a basic question like: “Write me a poem about rain!” or “Explain black holes like I’m five.” Within seconds, it generated short, concise, and polished replies.

It was fascinating, yet unnerving: how could something without a body, mind, or soul reply like this? Then, you tried to catch it off guard by asking about politics, philosophy, and psychology. But it replied with eerie eloquence, adapting to your tone and even referencing concepts you hadn’t mentioned.

The moment of watching words appear as if written, images as if captured, and videos as if filmed by humans is awe in the most modern form. On the other hand, there’s something uncanny about this one. The source of wonder no longer lies beyond us, but within what we’ve built to mirror ourselves.

⦿ 6️⃣ Is It Problematic?

The pyramids, cathedrals, and railroads of the past were also synthetic creations, but they were our attempt to represent forces beyond our control: nature, the divine, and the cosmos.

Today’s digital creations reverse that direction. We no longer build to honor the divine; we build to replicate ourselves. The awe of GenAI arises from the imitation of humans. We’re not gazing up at powers beyond comprehension; we’re gazing inward at a programmed version of ourselves. Yet this mirror isn’t transparent. The processes by which GenAI produces new content remain a mystery even to the tech giants that developed it.

An LLM is often referred to as a “black box” that consumes massive amounts of high-quality datasets and significant computing power to generate responses. Opening up that “black box” doesn’t help either because LLMs think before generating responses, which appears as a series of random numbered lists called neural activations: {0=0.083, 1=0.15, 2=0.47}.

That’s where awe becomes risky. Psychological research shows that awe can diminish one’s sense of self and increase deference to authority, especially when the source of power is poorly understood.

In 1961, American social psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to understand why ordinary people obey authority, even when it conflicts with their conscience. He invited volunteers to what they thought was an experiment on learning. Each “teacher” (i.e., volunteer) was told to administer an electric shock to a “learner” (i.e., an actor) whenever they answered incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time.

As the shocks grew stronger, the “learner” screamed in pain and eventually went silent. Many volunteers hesitated, visibly distressed, yet most continued when the experimenter calmly insisted: “The experiment requires that you continue.” Over 60% of volunteers went all the way to the maximum voltage, simply because an authoritative figure told them to.

These findings revealed how easily reverence for perceived authority can override moral reasoning. If we now stand in awe of AI-powered algorithms whose inner workings are hidden, we risk a similar surrender of personal agency: accepting GenAI not because it’s right, but because it feels beyond question.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

Awe has always driven humanity to look beyond itself. But with GenAI, the awe turns inward. While this can inspire curiosity, creativity, and collaboration, it also poses a crucial question: can we remain humbled by our creation without blindly obeying it or forgetting what we truly value?

Our ability to think critically is crucial to making the right choices. It comes from the Greek word Κριτικός (i.e., “Kritikos”), which means able to judge or discern. If we rely on GenAI to do everything, we risk shifting from active critical thinkers to passive information consumers who blindly follow what isn’t fully understood.

📒FINAL NOTE

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