Article

Character

Culture

Digital

23 January 2025

7 min read

Apple’s AI ads show how we can lose our moral skills

Apple Intelligence promises to safeguard us from the worst of ourselves.

Jenny Lander

Jenny is training to be a priest. She holds a PhD in law and writes at the intersection of law, politics and theology.

A worker at a desk sits back contemplating a situation

Dour Dale contemplates AI.

Apple.

“I got through the three stages of the interview process, and they said I had done well, but they aren’t hiring any computer science graduates anymore. AI is cheaper, and faster.”

John*, a bright 24-year-old coder and philosopher, has just completed an MSc in Computer Science from one of the top universities in the UK. And he can’t find a job. AI has outcompeted him. In a couple of years, he says, entry level into computer science as a field will require a PhD. What about in ten years, or twenty? Will the only people able to work in the field have to effectively be geniuses to keep up with a technology that’s metastasizing at the rate of knots? It felt painfully ironic to be discussing over coffee the death of an entire sector of meaningful jobs less than a week after the new Labour government announced its plans to “turbocharge” AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the saviour of the nation’s economy. What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of “national renewal”?

As worrying as John’s story is, there is much more than jobs – and the skills, knowledge and social relations tied up in them – on the line when it comes to AI. The alleged saviour of the nation’s economy is after your soul as well, it turns out.

This came home to me starkly over the Christmas holidays with the new advertisements for Apple Intelligence tools on MacBook Pro. In the first ad, “Lazy Lance” – a procrastinating business professional – sheepishly shifts in his seat. He has been asked to make a presentation on the new business prospectus, and he has been caught out, unprepared. But he is saved at the last moment. The click of the “Key Points” button using the new Apple Intelligence software on his MacBook Pro provides him with the critical breakdown summary needed to avoid becoming the pariah of the team. The sheepish shifting turns to smug smile: his substandard performance has evaded detection with the ready aid of Apple Intelligence.

In the second ad, “Dour Dale” – a disgruntled office worker – writes a scathing email to the “monster” who has devoured his pudding from the communal fridge. Before clicking send on this missive, he raises his eyes from the raging words on his screen to see a pious teddy bear holding a love-heart which says “find your kindness.” This moral cue from a cuddly toy prompts Dave to select the “Friendly” button from the dropdown list on Apple Intelligence writing tools, which immediately converts his childish strop over pudding thievery into a mature response in which he kindly expresses his disappointment along with a polite request for the pudding to be returned. The only moral effort required of Dale is the click of a button; Apple Intelligence sorts out the bile and the blame and re-presents his pudding fury in a professionally palatable manner.

These advertisements for AI tools are designed to provoke an empathetic laugh. Who indeed can honestly say they have never arrived unprepared to a meeting, or at least mentally penned a vindictive response to the tiniest office slight?

AI is poised to strike at the root of our individual virtue, by inserting itself as an emotional regulator.

However, underneath the easy laughs, I felt a profound sense of dis-ease when watching them. They indicate just how far AI has already begun to penetrate our moral economy. By inserting a technological tool to disguise or translate social interactions into new terms, our moral relations with each other are deceptively smoothed to avoid the social and personal costs of shame (e.g. Lance using “Key Points” rather than owning up to his poor work ethic) and anger (e.g. Dale using “Friendly” mode to transform his email from raging diatribe into courteous appeal). As appealing as it sounds to have automatic tech weapons to tranquilise social and emotional bugbears, they also remove daily opportunities to learn how to live and work together.

For example, as excruciating as it is to be the person who came to the meeting woefully under-prepared, embarrassment can be a very useful corrective in learning the art of time management as well as the virtue of pulling our weight. We probably all know from school what it feels like to work on a group project, when only half the group cares about the outcome. If we do not learn moral skills of responsibility and accountability in our formative years, the workplace becomes a vital school for virtue in adulthood where we learn what it means to be trusted and how to be worthy of it. As in the case of Lance, AI now offers us everyday tools which help us to avoid embarrassment and effectively hide our lack of effort, taking the edge off of the very exposure that would help us to grow in both skill and trustworthiness. This is not propaganda for the Protestant work ethic but rather a top survival tip for the human soul in hyper-capitalist economy. Maintaining the moral significance of our labour as a school of formation in self-respect and trustworthiness does not baptise the extractive and exploitative nature of many workplaces. Rather, it offers a means of resistance to the soul-destroying idea that we are all replaceable, that nothing really matters and that our efforts are simply grist for the eternal and insatiable mill of market supply and demand.

In the case of Dale, Apple Intelligence goes beyond protecting users from social shame: it promises to safeguard us from the worst of ourselves. Of the two Apple Intelligence advertisements, I find Dale’s to be even more pernicious because it evidences how AI is poised to strike at the root of our individual virtue, by inserting itself as an emotional regulator. Rather than doing the difficult work of redrafting the email himself, which would require Dale to critically examine his own reactions and put himself into the shoes of the recipient, Apple Intelligence offers to do it automatically. By short-circuiting Dale’s process of recognising the emotions underneath his rage, he misses a critical opportunity to learn for himself what his anger is all about, and even more than that, to practice the art of genuine self-mastery in conflict. The AI tool smooths out the conflict on the surface, while Dale is presumably left with all those rotten feelings built up and unprocessed, because he has not had to do the difficult work of converting his aggressive monologue into a respectful dialogue with another human being.

The insertion of these seemingly innocuous AI tools into the spheres of our everyday, workaday lives introduces new means and modes of (self) deception in our habits, where we are able to hide much more easily from honest moral evaluation of the quality of our work as well as our interpersonal relationships. It also risks new heights of moral “de-skilling” over time as we live in a social and economic world that has become so deeply mediated by technology, to the point where we may very well eventually trust Apple as the gold standard of professional behaviour rather than our own discernment. The soul – our very interiority – is the new frontier of economic expansion, in the name of securing Britain’s place in the ranks of global competitiveness.

To AI enthusiasts, all this may sound like Luddite naysaying. Many people find AI tools helpful in the process of research and preparation. Even some priests, I have recently discovered, use Chat GPT to aid sermon-writing. And what, as a priest friend asked me recently, is the problem with these time-saving tools, as long as we use them critically?

Apart from the obvious answer that AI can’t be trusted to get all the facts right, let alone the word of God, this question presumes that human beings’ critical faculties and moral compasses remain fundamentally unaffected by these new technologies. It may be true for older generations (whose formative years occurred well before the meteoric surge of digital technology in the early 2000s) that technology continues to function as an optional extra to make life that little bit easier. But for Gen Z and below, and even for some younger millennials, intuitive digital technologies have become so fused with the ways that we learn and process information that it is no longer – if it ever was – a neutral tool to improve our lives. We are only learning now about the extent to which social media has thoroughly penetrated the emotional worlds of teenagers, with severe consequences for their wellbeing. What will be the consequences for the generations to come, when AI becomes so integrated into the emotional and social fabric of our lives that we cannot quite tell where we start and it begins? The risk with “turbocharging” AI is not only a huge number of jobs, but the atrophy of our moral muscles as AI encroaches further into the heartlands of what it means to be human. While a few tech elites may always stay one step ahead of AI and keep it safely in the toolbox rather than the driver’s seat, most of us time-poor plebians are being taken for the ride of our lives.

*Name changed for anonymity.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.