El Ignaciano / September 2026

The Unfinished Question Mark: A Human Response to the Age of AI

Jorge R. Rodríguez

SECTION 1 — THE AGE OF AI AND THE HUMAN QUESTION

We are entering a new stage in humanity’s relationship with technology. Artificial intelligence is accelerating changes already underway in how we work, communicate, learn, create, and make decisions. Its capabilities are remarkable, and its possibilities are still unfolding. Yet the speed of this development can tempt us to focus almost entirely on what technology can do. The more fundamental question lies elsewhere. As our technological powers increase, are we becoming more capable of understanding how those powers should be used? The challenge of the age of AI is therefore not only technological. It is human. AI confronts us again with an old question made newly urgent: what kind of people must we become if our growing power is to serve rather than diminish the human person?

I explored this problem previously in my article ‘Can AI Be a New Tower of Babel?’ The biblical account of Babel (Gen 11:1–9) offers a warning not about human creativity itself, but about what can happen when human power becomes detached from humility, proper limits, and obedience to God. Artificial intelligence does not make Babel inevitable. But it gives renewed urgency to the question Babel places before us: what happens when what we are able to build begins to outpace our wisdom about why, when, and for whom it should be built?

That question cannot be answered by technical expertise alone. It requires a way of standing before a future we cannot fully predict or control. The temptation of technological power is to treat uncertainty as a defect to be eliminated and every limit as a problem to be overcome. But some questions must remain open long enough for us to discern what they are asking of us. The human challenge of the age of AI may therefore be less about mastering every new capability than about learning how to remain attentive, free, and responsive in the presence of what we do not yet know. Before asking what AI should become, we may first need to consider what kind of approach will allow us to meet its possibilities without surrendering either our humanity or our responsibility.

SECTION 2 — THE UNFINISHED QUESTION MARK

The Unfinished Question Mark offers an image for that approach. Unlike a question mark that closes neatly upon itself, it remains visibly open. Its unfinished form does not suggest that truth is unknowable or that decisions should be postponed indefinitely. Rather, it represents the willingness to resist premature closure; to stay with a question until we are prepared to receive what reality, experience, other persons, and ultimately God may reveal. In an age increasingly capable of producing immediate answers, the Unfinished Question Mark reminds us that an answer can arrive before understanding does.

To remain unfinished in this sense is not to remain undecided forever. Nor does it mean that every answer is equally valid or that commitment should be avoided. Responsible openness is different. It recognizes that some questions require patience because their meaning cannot be fully understood through the first available explanation, the loudest voice, or the most efficient solution. The Unfinished Question Mark therefore represents a discipline of judgment: the refusal to close a question before we have listened carefully enough, examined honestly enough, and discerned faithfully enough to act. Its openness is ordered toward truth and, ultimately, toward response.

Such a discipline cannot be sustained by technique alone. It asks something of the person who must practice it. We must be able to loosen our grip on the answer we prefer, resist the urge to force uncertainty into familiar categories, and become willing to encounter what we did not expect. That requires interior freedom: not passivity, but a readiness to attend, to be corrected, and to respond when greater clarity emerges. The Unfinished Question Mark therefore points beyond a method of inquiry toward a way of being. If we are to remain genuinely open without becoming directionless, we need a way of being free enough to discern and receptive enough to hear what the question may yet reveal.

SECTION 3 — FREEDOM AND RECEPTIVITY

Ignatian spirituality gives us a language for this freedom. In the Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises (§23), indifference does not mean apathy or lack of concern. It means becoming inwardly free from attachments that can shape our choices before we have discerned what is truly good. Such indifference does not ask us to care less. It asks us to become less governed by fear, preference, possession, or the desire to secure a particular outcome. In the age of AI, that same freedom matters when technological possibility exerts its own attraction. We can become attached not only to what we already possess, but also to what we are newly capable of doing. Ignatian indifference creates the interior space in which capability no longer dictates choice and the deeper question can remain open: what, among the possibilities before us, truly leads toward the good?

Freedom from attachment, however, is not yet enough. If indifference creates interior space, that space must remain open to what may be given. This is where a Principle of Receptivity becomes necessary. Receptivity is the active willingness to receive reality before forcing it into the shape of our expectations. It means allowing another person, an unexpected circumstance, a difficult truth, or the movement of God to confront us in ways we did not entirely choose. Such openness does not suspend judgment; it makes better judgment possible by preventing our preferences from becoming the measure of everything we encounter. Indifference loosens our hold on to the answer we want. Receptivity enables us to recognize an answer we might not have anticipated.

Scripture gives this approach a concrete form. At Pentecost (Acts 2:1–13), the disciples do not manufacture the Spirit or determine the mission entirely for themselves. They receive before they proclaim. The gift precedes the response. In Acts 9, the same pattern becomes intensely personal. Saul, interrupted on the road to Damascus, must surrender the future he had assumed for himself and wait for what comes next. Ananias, meanwhile, must receive a command that challenges what he believes he knows about Saul. Neither is simply passive. Both must listen, accept what is given, and then respond. Their stories suggest that receptivity is not an escape from action but a condition for faithful action: something is first given, then discerned, and only then answered.

Indifference and receptivity therefore belong together. Indifference frees us from the attachments that can decide the question before we have truly faced it; receptivity keeps that freedom open to what may be revealed. Without indifference, we risk hearing only what confirms the outcome we already prefer. Without receptivity, that interior freedom can remain directionless. Together they create the interior conditions for discernment: freedom from what distorts our judgment and openness to what may call us beyond ourselves. The Unfinished Question Mark gives this approach visible form. It asks us neither to cling to an answer nor to remain indefinitely suspended, but to stay open long enough for a faithful response to become possible. The next task, then, is to test the possibilities before us and determine which ones genuinely serve the human person.

SECTION 4 — DISCERNMENT IN THE AGE OF AI

When we turn specifically to artificial intelligence, discernment begins by refusing an easy choice between enthusiasm and rejection. The fact that a technology can perform something remarkable does not by itself tell us whether, when, or how that capability should be used. Neither does concern about its dangers justify treating every use of AI as a threat. This requires us to remain open to technological possibilities without surrendering our judgment to them. We can acknowledge genuine benefits, recognize genuine dangers, and still resist the pressure to decide in advance that innovation must either be embraced because it is new or rejected because it is disruptive. These capabilities present us with possibilities; they do not make the judgment for us.

That responsibility remains human. Artificial intelligence may generate an answer, recommend an action, or perform a task with extraordinary speed, but it does not relieve persons and communities of the obligation to judge the ends toward which such capabilities are directed. Human beings design these systems, decide where they will be used, establish the rules that govern them, and determine how much authority they will be given. We therefore cannot speak as though “AI” simply acts upon us from outside our own choices. Even when technological systems become complex enough that no single person controls every outcome, responsibility does not disappear. It becomes more demanding. The issue is not only what AI can do, but what we are choosing to ask it to do, what forms of dependence we are willing to create, and what responsibilities must continue to belong to human beings.

A useful criterion follows from this responsibility: the human person must come before the technology. The central question is not simply whether AI can make an activity faster, cheaper, or more efficient, but whether its use actually serves the persons affected by it. Does it strengthen human agency or quietly displace it? Does it deepen relationships or make persons increasingly interchangeable? Does it assist judgment while preserving responsibility, or encourage us to surrender decisions that properly belong to human beings? Efficiency can be a genuine good, but it is not the highest good. A technological system should therefore be evaluated by more than what it produces. We must also ask what kind of human life its use encourages, what capacities it strengthens or weakens, and whether the persons involved remain subjects to be served rather than problems to be optimized.

Discernment, however, cannot remain indefinitely at the level of questions. Its purpose is not to avoid decision but to make responsible choice possible. There comes a point when what has been received and tested must lead to judgment, and judgment must lead to action. That action may sometimes mean adopting a new capability; at other times it may mean limiting, reshaping, or refusing its use. The important point is that the decision should arise neither from fear nor fascination, but from a serious effort to understand what genuinely serves persons and the good we are called to pursue. The Unfinished Question Mark remains open while discernment is still required, but its openness is meant to lead to response. We do not remain unfinished because nothing can be known. We remain unfinished so that, when the moment for decision comes, we may act with greater freedom, greater responsibility, and greater faithfulness.

SECTION 5 — TOWARD FAITHFUL RESPONSE

We do not know where every development in artificial intelligence will lead. That unfinished future can make action seem difficult, but uncertainty does not release us from responsibility. We have always been called to act without possessing complete knowledge of what our choices will produce. The task is not to control the future before entering it, but to exercise judgment faithfully within the possibilities entrusted to us. In the age of AI, this means accepting our role as stewards rather than spectators: cultivating what genuinely serves human flourishing, guarding against what diminishes the person, and remaining willing to correct our course as greater understanding becomes possible.

Faithful response therefore requires participation. We cannot simply stand outside the technological world and judge it from a distance, nor should we assume that whatever becomes possible must eventually become normal. Each of us participates, in different ways, in shaping the environments in which technology is designed, adopted, governed, and used. That participation may take the form of choices made in families, schools, workplaces, churches, professions, institutions, or public life. The scale may differ, but the responsibility remains (Antiqua et Nova, §§42–46, 110–111). We help determine whether technology becomes a means of serving persons more fully or a force to which human life is increasingly adjusted. Such participation means entering that work with freedom, receptivity, discernment, and the courage to act on what we come to understand.

The Unfinished Question Mark returns us, finally, to the approach with which we began. It does not promise that every uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence will disappear, nor does it excuse us from making difficult choices before the future becomes clear. It reminds us instead that faithful action begins with the humility to admit that we do not yet possess every answer, the freedom to loosen our attachment to the answers we prefer, the receptivity to encounter what we have not anticipated, and the discernment to judge what truly serves the human person. Then we must act. The mark remains unfinished because the journey is not yet complete. Our task is not to close the future before it arrives, but to meet it attentively, responsibly, and faithfully ready to ask again when new questions emerge and ready to respond when the good becomes clear.

SOURCES

Rodríguez, Jorge R. “Can AI Be a New Tower of Babel?” El Ignaciano, Vol. 9, No. 2, June 2026.

Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises, §23, “Principle and Foundation.”

Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education. Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, January 28, 2025, §§42–46, 110–111.

AI USE DISCLOSURE

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was used as an AI-assisted tool in the development of this article, including a controlled methodology and article-engineering process involving structural development, drafting and revision, source checking, verification, and editorial preparation. The author directed and adjudicated that process, evaluated and approved the substantive content, and assumes full responsibility for the article and its final form.

Jorge R. Rodriguez is a permanent deacon, retired electrical engineer, and author whose work explores the relationship between technology, human formation, faith, and the challenges of contemporary life. He holds graduate degrees in electrical engineering and theology and brings both technical and theological perspectives to questions concerning artificial intelligence and the human person.