The trouble with too much certainty

A few months ago, my older brother, a doctor by profession and temperament alike, asked me almost casually what I planned to do next. The question appeared ordinary, almost routine, yet it lingered far longer than such questions usually do. I found myself without an immediate answer, not because ideas had deserted me, but because at this stage of life the future no longer presents itself as a neat sequence of tasks waiting to be completed. It arrives instead as a pause, weighted with memory, unfinished conversations, and questions that resist tidy resolution. The impatience of earlier years has gradually receded, replaced by a disposition more inclined toward contemplation than conquest.

Before our conversation drifted elsewhere, he added, almost as an aside, that he regularly reads my columns. The remark unsettled me more than I allowed him to notice. It touched a vulnerability I have carried quietly for years. Like many who write under the discipline of deadlines, I submit my pieces with urgency. Once sent to the editor, I rarely return to them. Writing, for me, has long been an act of release rather than refinement, an attempt to capture a thought before it dissolves. The slow labour of reworking has often seemed secondary to the pressure of articulation.

Sensing this unease, my brother gently suggested that I try having one of my pieces edited through artificial intelligence. I agreed out of curiosity rather than conviction, my scepticism intact. When the edited version arrived, I was struck by its clarity. The argument remained unchanged, the ideas unmistakably mine, yet the language moved with an ease that surprised me. Sentences no longer obstructed the thought they carried; they appeared to serve it. The experience was undeniably pleasing. Yet it also produced a deeper unease.

That unease lies not in the technology itself, but in what it may foreshadow. Artificial intelligence holds the potential to concentrate power in ways that delink consciousness from action, intention from responsibility, and agency from accountability. If such a trajectory unfolds, one must ask what would remain of human life half a century from now, particularly if accountability itself risks becoming obsolete. A world in which decisions are executed without moral authorship may be technologically sophisticated, but it would be ethically hollowed out.

This anxiety acquires a more disturbing dimension when placed alongside religious assurances of life after death. Death has historically been rendered safe through faith, but life has drawn its meaning from uncertainty, struggle, and moral choice. If technology were to predict or disclose what lies beyond death, belief would cease to be an existential commitment and become a matter of informational certainty. Such certainty would not deepen faith; it would erode it. Faith deprived of mystery tends to collapse into fear, resentment, or instrumental obedience rather than ethical self-restraint.

Ignorance is often described as bliss, yet only within limits. When ignorance is deliberately preserved or technologically managed to sustain belief, it mutates into vulnerability. The disclosure of ultimate truths through technical means would not liberate humanity but expose it to new forms of domination. Violence, both symbolic and physical, would likely intensify as individuals and communities attempt to compensate for a growing sense of inferiority and loss of meaning, born of the realization that even transcendence has been colonized by calculation.

The contemporary world already offers a warning. Despite unprecedented technological expansion and globalization, religions have not grown more humane or pluralistic. Many have instead become rigid, defensive, and intolerant. This suggests that technology does not dissolve existential anxiety; it amplifies it. When consciousness is reduced to performance, efficiency, and algorithmic output, moral imagination withers. What follows is not the enrichment of life but its thinning.

Yet history also offers a countervailing force. The erosion of consciousness is neither total nor irreversible so long as creativity remains alive. Fundamental sciences may continue to generate powerful technologies, but it is the creative and liberal arts that have historically mitigated human anxiety by restoring irony, ambiguity, and moral distance. Literature, particularly traditions such as Urdu poetry, has long unsettled moral certitudes by mocking the preacher, the judge, and the custodian of faith. Through wit, metaphor, and irony, it has rendered dogmatic accountability fragile, preserving a space for conscience beyond doctrine and calculation.

Creativity and genius operate in registers that exceed algorithmic predictability. They draw upon contradiction, silence, excess, and irony, dimensions that resist formalization. Artificial intelligence may outpace human cognition in speed and scale, but it cannot substitute the moral imagination that sustains solidarity. Without consciousness anchored in ethical responsibility, society loses its human substance. The death of consciousness thus becomes indistinguishable from the death of life, not biologically, but sociologically and morally.

The contemporary human condition differs sharply from that of earlier epochs. People no longer live primarily for the promise of the next world. They struggle for dignity, recognition, and security in this one. What sustains them is not certainty, but a fragile hope of solidarity. Confessional religion still offers a shared moral language and a sense of belonging. Yet as technology relentlessly advances goal rationality, metrics, outcomes, and efficiency, the language of public life shifts. Accountability risks becoming procedural rather than moral, enforced through systems rather than conscience.

What unsettles me most, then, is not artificial intelligence as a tool, but what it reveals. It exposes a longstanding gap between thinking and expression, between intellectual labour and its uncertain public afterlife. For years, I assumed this gap was personal and inevitable. Technology suggests otherwise. Ideas do not travel on their own. They require language, structure, and confidence. When these are absent, even careful thought remains confined.

The ethical challenge before us, therefore, is not to resist such technologies outright, but to learn how to inhabit them without surrendering depth, responsibility, or judgment. What is at stake is not authenticity, as is often claimed, but our discomfort with uncertainty. Uncertainty unsettles authority, belief, and knowledge. It demands responsibility without guarantees.

Urdu poetry arrived at this recognition long before algorithms.

Ghalib writes:

Pakṛe jāte haiñ farishtoñ ke likhe par nā-haq

Ādmī koī hamārā dam-e-taḥrīr bhī thā

He questions the very idea of a flawless moral ledger. His concern is not merely guilt, but representation. Who speaks for the human when judgment is written elsewhere? Accountability becomes text without presence, record without consent.

Iqbal echoes a similar suspicion:

Pursish-e-ḥāl kyā maqṣad thā ruswāʾī merī

Warna woh jānte the kyūñ huā, kaise huā

Here, questioning turns into spectacle. Inquiry is not meant to understand, but to expose. Moral concern dissolves into moral performance.

Raz offers a gentler resolution:

Ḥarsh hai raḥmat-e-bārī aur khulā daftar-e-ʿamal

Kam kī hai jins-e-ʿazāñ bhī dīvāne ke

Divine mercy overwhelms meticulous accounting. The ledger fades before lived human excess and vulnerability. The mad lover’s transgressions are few, uncalculated, born not of intent but of overflow.

Faiz compresses irony into two lines:

Ik fursat-e-gunāh milī vo bhī chār din

Dekhe haiñ ham ne hausle parvardigār ke

Even sin, Faiz suggests, is fleeting. Endurance belongs elsewhere. Moral absolutism quietly dissolves.

Taken together, these verses converge on a single insight: accountability is uncertain, mediated, and profoundly human. Judgment often masks power; certainty often conceals fear. What remains is responsibility, fragile yet unavoidable.

In this sense, artificial intelligence and poetry arrive at the same unsettling recognition. The real burden is not being judged, but being human in a world that insists judgment is final. Where we are heading remains unclear. For the moment, ignorance may still offer comfort. The far truth, however, continues to wait.

Prof. Ashok Kaul, Retired Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Banaras Hindu university