A former AI industry executive warned me this month: “Massive culture shock is coming.” He did not mean job losses or new regulations. He meant a collision between what artificial intelligence may soon be able to do and what people believe about themselves.

That warning came to mind as I read what the architects of artificial intelligence are now saying publicly. They are no longer talking about better software or faster computers. They are describing a new age for civilization itself.

Consider three of the most influential AI voices.

Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who leads Google DeepMind, told Fortune that humanity stands on the edge of a “golden era of discovery” and “radical abundance,” with AI curing major diseases, solving the energy crisis, and letting humanity “travel the stars and explore the galaxy.”

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, wrote in his essay “The Intelligence Age” that the coming years would bring “massive prosperity,” with “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics” becoming ordinary.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, describes a “country of geniuses in a data center” — AI systems carrying the combined brainpower of 50 million Nobel laureates — that he says could remake the world within a few years, for good or ill.

These are not science fiction writers speculating about a distant century. They lead organizations building the world’s most powerful AI systems, and their predictions — right or wrong — are already shaping the future.

That alone should get our attention. But amid the excitement about what artificial intelligence may soon accomplish, a more fundamental question receives little consideration: What will all this mean for being human?

First, Christians should resist both panic and hype.

The acceleration in AI capabilities is real. This week, scientists at Stanford and the Arc Institute used an AI model to design new viral genomes from scratch, and 16 proved viable, infecting and killing bacteria. It is a concrete sign AI is moving from analyzing biology to designing it, with real promise and real risk. Johns Hopkins biosecurity researchers warned that the ability to compose viral genomes with AI “now exists,” while “the governance to safely steer it does not.”

But forecasts of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) arriving in 2028, 2029, or 2030 remain forecasts. A self-sustaining intelligence explosion has not occurred. Human beings set objectives, validate results, supply enormous computing resources, and decide what the machines are supposed to do.

So, three things can be true simultaneously: The acceleration is real. The timetable is uncertain. And the rhetoric is racing ahead of both.

That rhetoric deserves particular scrutiny — and it is close to what my executive friend meant by culture shock.

When AI leaders speak of a golden era, a renaissance, or a country of geniuses that could remake the world within years, they have moved beyond engineering specifications. They are describing a destination — and doing so in language that sounds less like technological progress and more like human deliverance.

The storyline is difficult to miss. Humanity suffers disease, scarcity, and short lives. Artificial intelligence supplies greater intelligence, which accelerates medicine and discovery. Old limitations fall away. Abundance follows. A new civilization emerges.

Curing cancer is good. Christians can welcome much in that vision. But technology crosses an important line when it moves from promising better tools to offering a vision of human destiny.

That is where Christians must offer a different account.

The technological diagnosis of our predicament focuses on limitation: we do not know enough, produce enough, live long enough, or possess enough intelligence to solve our problems.

Christianity gives a far less flattering diagnosis. Our fundamental problem is not insufficient computing power. It is sin. The deepest human crisis is not ignorance but alienation from our Creator. No increase in intelligence, however extraordinary, can repair that breach.

Intelligence is not righteousness. Knowledge is not wisdom. Abundance is not redemption. Longevity is not eternal life. And artificial intelligence, regardless of how powerful it becomes, cannot change the human heart.

There is another danger as machines grow more capable. We may begin measuring ourselves by the standards of the machines we created.

If an AI system writes faster than we do, remembers more than we do, analyzes more information than we can, and eventually outperforms many highly educated professionals, where does that leave human worth?

The Christian answer is indispensable precisely because it refuses the premise.

Human dignity has never depended on IQ, productivity, memory, or economic usefulness. Scripture locates it beyond any machine’s reach: when the Lord sent Samuel to anoint Israel’s next king, He said, “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, ESV). That worth comes from the Creator, not from our capabilities.

Our worth is bestowed, not computed.

That means the brilliant scientist, the disabled child, the elderly patient, the unborn baby, and the productive executive possess the same fundamental human dignity before God. Each bears a dignity no benchmark can measure, and no machine can acquire by growing more capable.

This is why the debate over AI cannot be left exclusively to Silicon Valley.

Hassabis, Altman, Amodei, and their colleagues are extraordinarily accomplished people. They may prove correct about much of the change they foresee. But technical expertise does not confer authority to define human purpose.

If artificial intelligence reshapes work, education, medicine, relationships, and warfare, then choices made in a handful of laboratories and corporations will shape how society understands freedom, responsibility, dignity, and personhood.

Those questions belong to families, churches, citizens, and governments — not engineers or corporate boards — because they concern not what our machines can do, but what civilization we intend to become.

Building artificial intelligence may be an engineering problem. Deciding what human beings are for is not.

Christians have no reason to retreat from the AI revolution. We should welcome technologies that heal disease, reduce suffering, expand knowledge, and steward creation responsibly. But we must also refuse to confuse progress with salvation.

For all AI may accomplish, the decisive contest of this new era may have little to do with which laboratory reaches AGI first. It may be whether a civilization dazzled by artificial intelligence remembers what a human being is.

“It is he who made us, and we are his” (Psalm 100:3, ESV). That truth cannot be revised by an algorithm, surpassed by a benchmark, or patented by a laboratory.

Artificial intelligence may help write the next chapter of human history. It will never become history’s author — and it will never be history’s Lord.

That is the truth Christians must carry into the culture shock now coming.