Vital thinking and resistance in the age of artificial intelligence

Abstract

From a philosophical and critical methodology, this article offers an introductory analysis of certain reflective tensions arising from the advance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly those involving the possible subordination of human subjectivity to the technical logic of calculation, efficiency, and automation. It argues that while AI can optimize tasks and data processing, its operation remains constrained by algorithmic structures that lack self-awareness, intrinsic ethics, and lived experience of meaning. In contrast, vital thought -understood as a form of critical reflection, embodied experience, and awareness of finitude-emerges as a path of resistance against the risks of emotional standardization, loss of personal autonomy, and, more broadly, dehumanization. Vital thought not only questions the power structures that sustain technoscientific expansion but also enables the production of existential meaning and the reaffirmation of the human. Thus, this text insists on the need to preserve and foster vital thought in educational processes, going beyond mere adaptation to technological advances, avoiding their fetishization, and recognizing that AI, though useful, must be subordinated to a horizon that places the highest human qualities at its center.