What is AI Calling Forth in Us?

On anxiety, archetypes and the return of the feminine.

Last week I sat in a resonant lecture about how certain patterns seem to repeat in human life across cultures and generations. The conversation turned to the idea that these patterns don’t vanish — they evolve. In Jungian psychology, they’re called archetypes: deep symbolic images that live in our collective unconscious (the part of the psyche we all share).

As I listened, I started thinking about AI and how the anxiety around it might not just be about machines, but about something deeper: our relationship to change, to the unknown, and perhaps… to the forgotten feminine.

I know, it sounds a bit far-fetched. But bear with me.

Think about the psyche as a body. The body automatically regulates itself: when we’re too hot, we sweat; when we’re cold, we shiver. It just happens, without conscious will. Jung believed that the psyche works in a similar way. When we hold a certain conscious attitude too tightly, the unconscious will attempt to balance it — often through dreams. For example, if we’re in conflict with someone and feel certain we’re right, we might dream of that person confronting us. It’s the unconscious’ way of gently suggesting we reconsider our righteous stance.

So the idea is this: the unconscious compensates for what consciousness overemphasizes. And just as this applies to individuals, Jung believed it applies to the collective as well.

For centuries, the dominant (and patriarchal) culture has privileged speed, logic, mastery, performance, utility, competition, and control — qualities often associated with a masculine psychological attitude. Which means, in Jung’s framework, that the feminine has been pushed into the unconscious.

I should pause here to be clear: when I speak of the “feminine,” I don’t mean it in a gendered or biological way, but in an archetypal one. Feminine qualities aren’t exclusive to women, just as masculine ones aren’t exclusive to men. We all carry both.

Now, as AI grows more powerful — surpassing these very human (and dominantly masculine) capacities of logic, analysis, and productivity — many of us ask: What will be left for us to do?

A recent New York Times article by Robert Capps — shared by my editor friend — caught my attention. The journalist suggested that three human traits might remain especially valuable alongside AI: trust, integration and taste. (He even sketched out 22 future jobs organized around these traits.)

These aren’t technical skills. They’re relational, intuitive, aesthetic. And during the lecture, I realized: these are also maybe distinctly feminine principles. And like many things feminine, they’ve long been overlooked, diminished, or dismissed as “soft.” So what do they do?

• Trust calls us into relationship. It requires vulnerability, openness, and a willingness to not know in advance — the opposite of control.

• Integration implies the capacity to hold complexity, nuance, and contradiction. It asks us to weave rather than divide.

• Taste draws on discernment, sensibility, and embodied knowing — something no algorithm can quite replicate. It’s close to feeling and intuition, as opposed to logic and rationality.

So perhaps the unconscious has been preparing us for the return of these feminine principles. We see signs of it in the rising presence of the dark feminine in both myth and culture — figures like Medusa, Lilith, and Kali. But also in the mainstream: in Wednesday Addams, who refuses to conform or smile on cue; in Billie Eilish, whose music gives voice to alienation and vulnerability; in the Barbie movie, where the glossy ideal gives way to existential doubt; and in shows like Big Little Lies, where women navigate trauma, silence, rage, and buried truths beneath lives that appear outwardly perfect.

Maybe all this points to a cultural hunger for something more real — something that includes the parts we’ve been told to suppress. Maybe we’re not just longing for light and control, but for wholeness, sustainability, and depth.

So perhaps the question isn’t only “How can we compete with AI?” or “How can we better control it?” — but rather: What is AI’s emergence asking of us? Instead of either/or perhaps it’s a both/and.

And maybe this is also threshold moment. Not a regression, but an evolution. A moment to allow the feminine attitude its rightful place beside the masculine and to become more fully human in the process integrating all of our qualities.

I realize I might have to eat my hat if AI really does take us all out one day, or if people start preferring using AI for psychoanalysis.

But I’ll take the risk.

For now, I’ll keep trusting, integrating, and using my own taste. And if AI really does end up handling most things, maybe I’ll apply for one of those new roles — like Differentiation Designer. Sounds fun.