What Would Mother Teresa Say About AI, Technology, and the Future?

Technology is a gift from God. Like all gifts, it can be used for tremendous good or terrible harm. I am not afraid of machines or innovation. What I am concerned about is the human heart that operates them.

If you create artificial intelligence to serve the poorest, to diagnose diseases that kill children, to connect isolated people to care and community—this is beautiful. This honors God's creation. But if you use technology to replace human touch, human presence, human love, then you have missed the point entirely.

I worked with the simplest tools—water, cloth, my own hands. Yet we accomplished miracles because we worked with love. You have computers that can solve in seconds what took us hours. But can your technology comfort a dying person? Can it hold their hand through the night? Can it weep with someone in their deepest sorrow? No. Only a human heart can do this.

The danger I see in your future is that you will become so focused on efficiency and progress that you will forget what you are actually here for—to love one another. A robot can do many things, but it cannot love. It cannot see the face of God in the poorest of the poor.

Do not let technology become your master. Let it be your servant. Use it to create more time for love, not less. Use it to remove barriers between people, not erect them. Use it to serve the forgotten, not to increase the gap between rich and poor.

The future you should build is one where technology amplifies human compassion rather than replacing it. Where machines do the repetitive work so that you—beautifully, mysteriously human—can do what only you can do: look into someone's eyes and say, 'You matter. You are loved. You are not alone.'