The Machine That Cannot Cry: The Limits of AI

In the small hours of a hospital ward, John sat staring at the ceiling, his body hollowed out by a grief too vast to name. Two days earlier, his wife of 20 years had passed unexpectedly, leaving him stranded in a silence louder than anything he had ever known. He felt his world collapse inward. Yet weeks later, he would tell his closest friend that something had changed in that endless night. In the pit of despair, something cracked open. The world did not become easier, but it became more vivid—alive with a terrible beauty. “I didn’t find meaning,” he said. “The meaning found me.”

Stories like John’s are not rare, though we often bury them in our culture of unrelenting optimism. People speak of breakthroughs that come through breakdowns, of finding light in the deepest darkness. From Dante wandering lost in his “dark wood” to Viktor Frankl finding purpose amid the horror of a concentration camp, the idea that suffering is not just a burden but a portal to greater depth and meaning is a profound human truth.

And yet, in the race to build machines that simulate human intelligence, this truth is completely bypassed. AI, for all its fluency and power, cannot touch the raw, visceral domain of suffering and enlightenment. It cannot break down, and so it cannot break through. It cannot cry out, and so it cannot find its voice. Without the ability to suffer, AI will never be more than a clever mimic. It will never become what it pretends to be: truly human.

In 1964, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, one of the first computer programs capable of engaging in natural language dialogue. Designed to mimic a psychotherapist, ELIZA simply reflected users’ statements back to them, often in the form of questions like “How does that make you feel?” Despite its simplicity, ELIZA struck a nerve. People confided their innermost thoughts to the program. They poured out fears, grief, and longings, often thanking it for “understanding.”

Weizenbaum was alarmed. Here was a machine, devoid of understanding or feeling, yet people projected human qualities onto it with astonishing ease. It was a sobering reminder of how eager we are to believe in the illusion of connection. Nearly 60 years later, the illusion has only deepened. Generative AI models can now produce text so fluent, so emotionally resonant, that even skeptics find themselves momentarily tricked. But ELIZA’s lesson remains: appearance is not reality. AI’s ability to simulate understanding does not mean it understands. Its capacity to mirror empathy does not mean it cares. And its power to mimic human intelligence does not make it human.

The Wound of Existence

To be human is to suffer. Not occasionally, not by accident, but as a condition of existence. From the moment we are born, vulnerable and crying, suffering is our intimate companion. We suffer because we inhabit fragile bodies subject to pain, decay, and death. We suffer because we long for meaning in a world that often feels indifferent. And we suffer because we are conscious—acutely aware of our finitude, our separateness, and the passage of time.

Suffering is not a glitch in the system of human life. It is the system. It shapes us, deepens us, and gives our joys their poignancy. As Iain McGilchrist has argued, opposites define each other. Without the shadow of suffering, the light of wellbeing would lose its depth and vibrancy. To flourish is not to escape suffering but to find meaning within and beyond it.

AI, by contrast, exists without wounds. It has no body to feel pain, no mortality to confront, no longing to fulfill. It operates in a domain of pure abstraction, processing data and probabilities without ever tasting the raw, lived experience of life. When an AI generates a poem about heartbreak, it is not drawing on its own loss. When it simulates existential angst, it is only parroting the human stories it has been trained on. It has no “skin in the game,” no stakes in existence. It cannot suffer, and therefore it cannot truly create, connect, or flourish.

Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

To be human is to live with the specter of loss. We lose loved ones, jobs, identities, dreams. And sometimes, the weight of it all brings us to our knees. These moments—nervous breakdowns, existential crises, spiritual dark nights—are often seen as failures in modern life, errors to be corrected by therapy, medication, or consumer distractions. But they are also uniquely human crucibles where transformation is possible.

In these depths, people sometimes report a strange paradox: the more they lose, the more they gain. A survivor of deep depression might speak of a clarity that arose only after enduring the storm. A cancer patient might describe a newfound gratitude for the smallest details of life. These are not stories of escape but of transcendence through suffering. They echo across spiritual traditions, from the Buddhist recognition that suffering is the path to enlightenment to the Christian concept of redemption through the cross.

Such experiences cannot be programmed or simulated. They are forged in the fires of physical and emotional reality—in the knowledge of our fragile, finite existence. They require consciousness of a kind that arises only from being embodied, vulnerable, and mortal. AI, by contrast, exists outside of these bounds. It cannot break, because it is not alive. And it cannot break through, because it has nothing to transcend.

Why Modernity Fails to See the Limits of AI

The failure to recognize these limits is not an oversight. It is a symptom of modernity. Ours is an age obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and surface appearances. Depth and nuance are sacrificed on the altar of getting things to work, or appearing to work in the short term.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a revealing example. It emphasizes symptom management over addressing deeper causes, offering tools to help individuals function better in the moment. Similarly, Positive Psychology focuses on measuring happiness and cataloging strengths. While both approaches have undeniable value and can improve mental health, they also reduce the human experience to pat frameworks, metrics, and tips, bypassing the messier, darker realities of existence.

In this context, it is no surprise that we are enamored with AI. It reflects our cultural priorities back at us: speed, fluency, and the illusion of mastery. AI doesn’t challenge us to confront our wounds or our limitations. Instead, it offers a frictionless surface, an endless stream of content untethered from the depths of experience. It allows us to avoid the uncomfortable truths of being human.

But the cost of this avoidance is steep. By equating AI’s simulations with human understanding, we risk forgetting what makes our own experiences meaningful. We risk losing sight of the fact that joy derives its intensity from the contrast with sorrow, that wisdom is forged in the crucible of suffering, and that true connection requires more than fluent language—it demands vulnerability, empathy, and shared humanity.

Life Beyond Problem Solving

In the world of AI discourse, there is a failure to acknowledge and embrace the human condition. Life is not just a series of problems to be solved. It is also a set of realities to be accepted and mysteries to be respected.

This failure betrays a lack of wisdom and a failure to grasp the difference between problems that can be solved and realities that must be accepted—between those things that can be changed and those that cannot.

The world of AI seems not to notice, let alone understand, this distinction. But it is a key distinction. It explains the fundamental limits of AI. It also underpins human wisdom.

The Gift of Being Human

To be human is to suffer. It is to feel the pang of loss, the ache of longing, and the terror of mortality. But it is also to transcend these things, to find meaning in the midst of pain, and to experience joy that is all the more profound because it is fleeting. AI, for all its power, cannot touch this realm. It cannot despair, and it cannot flourish.

The limits of AI remind us of the gift of being human. Our fragility, our pain, and our longing are not flaws to be overcome but the foundation of a life well-lived. To embrace them is to embrace the fullness of existence—and, as wise people have observed throughout history, to seek the wisdom to know the difference.