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Is liberalism premised on an unrealistically individualist anthropology? In one regularly told story about modernity, the earliest liberals grounded their arguments for political liberty in a picture of human nature that centered on our moral autonomy, perhaps epitomized best in Kantian thought. However, a range of critics have now compellingly argued that such accounts of our agency are descriptively inaccurate, and that normative social projects beginning from such flawed foundations are thus unstable. While this paper accepts this criticism of individualist anthropologies, it proposes that this need not identify a problem with liberalism overall. To make this case, this paper turns to Adam Smith, who grounded his early advocacy of liberalism in an anthropology grounded in natural theology that depicts us as morally interconnected, rather than as autonomous, and as always morally impressionable. As it will explain, Smith presumed an account of character as integrally related to and influenced by the agent’s social context, for both better and worse. Furthermore, he wove his attentiveness to this complex interaction between the agent and their context into both his economic analyses and political proposals. Smith’s social vision thus illustrates how a strong regard for individual liberty is fully compatible with a sophisticated anthropology that recognizes our malleability as moral agents – and even with political proposals that capitalize upon this malleability. Smith’s thought thus offers useful resources for contemporary proponents of liberalism who wish to value the dignity of individuals without basing that valuation in unrealistic abstractions, or ignoring the responsibilities engendered by the fact of our ongoing moral formation by our social contexts.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence displayed by machines, in contrast with the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals. It is also known as machine intelligence (MI) and is used because a machine mimics the cognitive functions that humans associate with human ability, such as logical reasoning, learning, and problem-solving. From Facebook’s automatic tagging suggestions to driverless cars, AI is rapidly progressing, and therefore, the ethical and moral question now is not whether AI should exist or not. AI exists and is already helping in improving various aspects of life such as health, safety, convenience, and overall standard of living. AI can replace or substitute routine mechanical, repetitive, boring jobs to free and unleash human creative and innovative talent to big thinking projects and humanizing work and society. AI can provide digital assistance in routine day-to-day tasks, detect cancer, diagnose rare diseases, and even prevent car crashes. AI can replace jobs, however, but not human work. Work as a duty, self-actualization and destiny will always continue, if not on the shop or office floors or boardrooms, at home, gardens, places of prayer and worship, and labs of creativity and innovation, in society and civilizations. While AI may indirectly free human talent for more meaningful and creative work, it can rarely participate in higher purposes such as creating bonding and belonging groups, in creating forgiving and compassionate communities, in drumming up small business, startups and corporations, and in harmonizing and humanizing this planet and cosmos for bliss or happiness. This chapter on AI, while investigating its market turbulence, will go beyond the legal aspects to ethical, moral, and spiritual dimensions and sacred opportunities of AI.