Machines lack something essential: compassion
At São Paulo Innovation Week, physicist Marcelo Gleiser invited a crowded auditorium to pause before the accelerating momentum of technological change and ask what, precisely, we risk leaving behind. His argument was not against progress, but for the wisdom to recognize that machines can extend human capability without replacing human essence — that compassion, moral judgment, and the full weight of lived experience are not features to be engineered, but foundations to be protected. In a gathering devoted largely to what we can build, Gleiser's voice was a reminder that the deeper question has always been what we choose to remain.
- As AI reshapes labor, medicine, and mental health care, a physicist stepped forward to name the anxiety most people carry quietly: that humanity itself may be quietly optimized away.
- Gleiser's warning about AI in therapy struck a nerve — algorithms can map distress, but they cannot sit with a person in their darkness, and that absence is not a minor technical gap but a profound human one.
- The festival's scale — over two thousand speakers across three days — reflects how urgently society is trying to think through questions that are no longer hypothetical: immortality, genetic redefinition of life, and the moral ground beneath it all.
- Gleiser is pushing the conversation toward an unlikely coalition: later in the week, he joins a monk and an indigenous leader to ask what science, spirituality, and ancestral wisdom can offer each other.
- The trajectory he proposes is not a retreat from technology but an insistence that social, ethical, and moral values must be load-bearing structures in whatever future we construct — not decorative additions applied afterward.
Marcelo Gleiser took the stage at São Paulo Innovation Week this week and asked the question that hovered over the entire festival: how do we stay human in a world that keeps getting more technological? Speaking under the title "Brilliant Minds Don't Think Alike: Why the Limits of Reason Make Us More Human," the physicist used his time to pull the audience through history and into a future that already feels half-arrived.
The questions he raised were not rhetorical. Will machines replace human work? Could science deliver immortality? As genetic engineering advances, what counts as life? And beneath all of it: what ethics and moral values will we stand on when these stop being hypothetical? His answer was direct — the future cannot be built on technology alone. Social, ethical, and moral values, working alongside human judgment and feeling, are the foundations that will determine whether progress becomes prosperity or something closer to catastrophe.
One of his sharpest concerns was the growing use of AI in therapy and mental health treatment. Machines, he said, lack something essential to that work: compassion. An algorithm can recognize patterns in human distress, but it cannot feel the weight of another person's suffering or sit with someone in their darkness. That absence, he argued, matters enormously.
Gleiser's presence at the festival extends beyond a single talk. Later this week he joins a monk and indigenous leader Ailton Krenak for a conversation on science, spirituality, and ancestral wisdom — a session that reflects his deeper conviction: that the conversation about humanity's future cannot happen only in the language of innovation. It must also include older ways of knowing. The future will be shaped not only by what we can build, but by what we choose to preserve.
Marcelo Gleiser stood before a packed auditorium at São Paulo Innovation Week this week and asked a question that hung in the air like smoke: How do we stay human in a world that keeps getting more technological?
The physicist, speaking under the title "Brilliant Minds Don't Think Alike: Why the Limits of Reason Make Us More Human," spent his time at the festival—which runs through Friday at venues in Pacaembu and Faap—pulling the audience backward through history and then forward into a future that already feels half-real. The São Paulo Innovation Week, organized by Estadão and Base Eventos, has drawn over two thousand speakers across three days to discuss everything from artificial intelligence to agriculture, from finance to philosophy. Gleiser's contribution was to name the anxieties most people feel but rarely voice aloud.
The questions he posed were not rhetorical exercises. Will machines do the work humans do now? What happens when people live longer than they ever have before? Could science actually deliver immortality? As genetic engineering advances, what counts as life anymore? And underneath all of it: what ethics, what values, what moral ground will we stand on when these things stop being hypothetical?
Gleiser's answer was direct. The future cannot be built on technology alone. It requires what he called social, ethical, and moral values—the full apparatus of human feeling and judgment working alongside our capacity to think. These are the foundations, he argued, that will determine whether technological progress becomes prosperity or something closer to catastrophe. The audience, he noted, needed to understand that the question of which values guide us forward is not separate from the question of technological advancement. It is the same question.
One concern Gleiser emphasized was the growing use of artificial intelligence in therapy and mental health treatment. He urged caution. Machines, he said, lack something essential to that work: compassion. It is a simple observation that carries weight. An algorithm can recognize patterns in human distress. It cannot feel the weight of another person's suffering. It cannot sit with someone in their darkness. These absences matter, especially when the stakes are a person's wellbeing.
Gleiser's schedule at the festival extends across all three days. Later this week, he will join the monk Coen and indigenous leader Ailton Krenak for a conversation titled "What Is Reality? Science, Spirituality, and Ancestral Wisdom in Dialogue." The session speaks to what Gleiser seems most concerned with: that the conversation about humanity's future cannot happen only in the language of technology and innovation. It must also include the languages of spirit, of tradition, of ways of knowing that predate the modern world. The future, in other words, will be determined not just by what we can build, but by what we choose to preserve.
Citações Notáveis
Social, ethical, and moral values—combined with how we process ideas and feelings—must form the foundation for future prosperity— Marcelo Gleiser
Machines lack a component essential to therapy: compassion— Marcelo Gleiser
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
When Gleiser asks how we preserve humanity in an increasingly technological society, what does he actually mean by humanity? Is it something we're in danger of losing?
I think he means the full texture of what makes us human—our capacity for compassion, for moral judgment, for sitting with uncertainty and ambiguity. Not just our ability to think, but to feel and to choose based on values that aren't reducible to efficiency or data.
But couldn't you argue that technology itself is human? We invented it. It's an expression of human creativity.
That's true, and I don't think Gleiser would disagree. The worry isn't technology itself. It's that we might build a world so dependent on technological solutions that we forget to ask whether those solutions are actually what we need. An AI therapist is technologically impressive. But it's not the same as human connection, and pretending it is would be a kind of loss.
He mentions immortality and genetic engineering. Are those the real threats, or are they just examples?
They're examples of a deeper question: as we gain the power to reshape life itself, what principles guide us? Without a clear answer to that—without shared values—we could end up with a future that's technically possible but morally incoherent.
Why does he bring in Ailton Krenak and a Buddhist monk to discuss this? Why not just more scientists?
Because the conversation can't happen only in the language of innovation and progress. Indigenous wisdom and spiritual traditions have been thinking about what it means to live well for centuries. If we ignore those voices, we're impoverishing ourselves right when we need all the wisdom we can get.