Tadany Um refúgio para a alma e um convite à consciência.
By Acharya Tadany.
Published in the Diário de Santa Maria, October 8, 2026.
…technology must be a mirror that expands our vision, never the cage that imprisons our capacity to love and to give genuine meaning to our existences.
When I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as a teenager, my worldview changed definitively. The work confronted two opposing universes: on one side, a hyper-structured, mechanized, antiseptic, and coldly efficient society; on the other, the “savages,” guardians of the arts, of feelings, and of the contradictions that define our very human essence.
Today, faced with the vertiginous advance of Artificial Intelligence, it is inevitable to infer that we are moving at an accelerated pace toward a new global bipolarity. This is not merely a technical transition, but a profound reconfiguration of our social existence, divided between two parallel and asymmetric worlds.
On one side, we will have the hyper-technological nations: highly thriving economies, dominated by automation, robotics, and super-productivity. However, this aseptic efficiency will come at a high price.
As a result, in the economic and social sphere, the abyss between rich and poor will widen, squeezing the middle class until it disappears and generating structural unemployment. On the emotional plane, standardization and the excessive mediation of algorithms risk anesthetizing relationships, exchanging organic empathy for cold convenience. In essence, the benefit will be material abundance; the risk, however, will be the loss of the soul and psychic isolation.
At the other extreme will be societies with low AI implementation: economies anchored in human labor in agriculture, industry, and services. Although they may display a smaller GDP, these countries can cultivate a more harmonious and connected social fabric.
In this scenario, the benefit will be the preservation of a sense of community, the value of touch, and the appreciation of conscious human effort. On the other hand, the risks involve economic stagnation and geopolitical dependence on technological powers.
Faced with this inevitable transition, I believe that preparation demands ethical maturity and discernment, particularly in the following aspects:
• For Individuals: It is urgent to cultivate intrinsically human competencies such as creativity, critical thinking, spirituality, and empathy. The value of an individual should not be measured by their algorithmic productivity, but by their capacity for presence and awareness.
• For Governments: It is crucial to create adapted social safety nets, such as the taxation of automated systems and the reformulation of education for the post-industrial era, ensuring that progress does not become exclusion.
• For Institutions: It is their duty to impose ethical limits on technology, using AI as a tool for amplifying human dignity, but never as an instrument of dehumanization.
I say this because the true crossroads of our time does not lie in the capacity of machines to simulate the human mind, but in the tragic possibility that human beings will come to live, feel, and think like machines.
Material progress reaches its summit precisely when we strip ourselves of the superfluous, and perhaps the great paradox of the 21st century will be to discover that true luxury will not lie in the speed of the algorithm, but in the courage to sustain silence, emotional presence, and the depth of a genuine, human, and natural gaze.
In other words, technology must be a mirror that expands our vision, never the cage that imprisons our capacity to love and to give genuine meaning to our existences.
In summary, I believe the future need not be an abyss between the cold machine and stagnation; however, it demands that we have the wisdom to unite the efficiency of innovation with the preservation of what is most sacred to us: our intrinsic humanity.
Acharya Tadany
Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash
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