Israel Centeno

The technological avalanche does not appear avoidable. Within a few years, the expansion of artificial intelligence, advanced robotics — such as those developed by Boston Dynamics — and immersive digital environments will surpass even the futuristic intuitions once imagined in Blade Runner. This is not alarmism; it is trajectory.
Machines will exceed human beings in calculation, speed, and operational efficiency. But functional superiority is not wisdom. Instrumental intelligence can be replicated; wisdom cannot. Wisdom presupposes orientation toward an ultimate end, discernment of the good, and an understanding of being at its root. A machine processes information; it does not participate in being.
The decisive issue lies elsewhere. As long as we remain absorbed in the contingent, technology will generate for us increasingly refined contingencies: personalized realities, tailored experiences, simulated environments calibrated to individual desire. Each person may inhabit a comfortable cognitive enclosure. Not through overt coercion, but through perpetual gratification — a simulation, a Matrix aligned with expectation.
The deepest alienation will not be oppression, but the erosion of metaphysical restlessness. When every immediate appetite can be artificially satisfied, the impulse to transcend may quietly dissolve.
The alternative is not to resist technological development as though it could be halted. It cannot. The alternative is metaphysical.
The human being is not merely another contingent system. In classical metaphysics, every created being is composed of essence and act of being — what a thing is, and that it is. No creature possesses existence as its own intrinsic possession; it receives it. Only Pure Act — God — is subsistent Being itself, without composition, limitation, or dependency.
If human consciousness loses reference to that ontological foundation, it risks reduction to the programmable. But if it orients itself toward Pure Act — toward the transcendent ground that sustains all non-simulated reality — it can pass through technological expansion without being absorbed by it.
The avalanche will come. The question is not whether it advances, but from what depth of being we confront it: from sheer contingency, or from conscious participation in Being itself.