Can Any Technology Ever Replace the Human Conscience?

What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?

There will be machines that diagnose better than physicians and compose music that moves us to tears. There will never be a device that tells a man whether he has done right. This is not a bug awaiting a patch. It is the shape of being a person.

This blog post reminds readers that technological progress is inevitable and beneficial in many fields, including law, medicine, and communication. Yet, while machines may surpass humans in speed, precision, and analytical power, they cannot possess a conscience or bear moral responsibility. Every technological tool is ultimately an instrument whose ethical value depends on the choices of the person using it.

The Thing That Will Not Change

On the technology I am certain of, and the certainty no technology can touch

WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 14 July 2026

The prompt asks a simple question: what is a piece of technology I am convinced will exist in twenty years? It is the kind of question that invites a confident answer, and confidence is easy to manufacture. Twenty years is far enough away that no one will remember what I predicted, and near enough that the prediction feels responsible rather than fanciful.

So let me give my answer plainly, and then let me give the answer beneath the answer — which is the one I actually care about.

I. What I Am Convinced Of

I am convinced that within twenty years, the drafting of law will be done in partnership with machines.

Not the making of law. Not the deciding. The drafting — the slow, exacting, deeply unglamorous work of turning a policy intention into words that will hold under the weight of a courtroom, a hostile counsel, and thirty years of unanticipated facts. That work will be assisted, checked, cross-referenced, and stress-tested by systems that do not tire, do not forget the third proviso to section 12, and do not lose the thread at four in the afternoon.

I say this not as a futurist but as a draftsman. I spent decades in the Kerala Law Department doing precisely this work — and I know, with the particular knowledge that only tedium confers, exactly which parts of it are craft and which parts are mere endurance. Endurance can be delegated. Craft cannot.

I am equally convinced of a second thing, and it follows from the first: the drafting of law will be better for it, and also more dangerous. Better, because the technical errors that plague legislation — the missed consequential amendment, the definition that contradicts itself across three chapters, the schedule that no longer matches the section it serves — these are errors of attention, and attention is the thing machines are least likely to run out of. More dangerous, because a Bill that is technically flawless can still be morally rotten, and technical flawlessness has a way of looking like legitimacy.

A well-drafted injustice is still an injustice. It is merely harder to argue with.

II. The Test I Would Apply

There is a discipline in legislative drafting that I have found travels well beyond it. Before a clause survives, it must answer three questions.

What mischief does it remedy? — Not what benefit does it promise, but what actual, identifiable harm does it prevent. Promises are cheap; mischief is concrete.

Can it be enforced? — A provision that cannot be enforced is not a law. It is a wish written in the register of command, and it corrodes the authority of everything around it.

Does it respect the dignity of the person it governs? — This is the question that no drafting manual insists upon and every good draftsman asks anyway.

Apply that test to technology and it does honest work. Ask of any new invention: what mischief does it remedy? Can its harms be governed? And does it treat the person as an end, or as a resource to be processed?

Most of what is being promised to us in the name of the future fails the third question. It does not fail loudly. It fails quietly, by simply never asking.

III. The Thing That Will Not Change

Here, then, is the answer beneath the answer.

I am convinced that in twenty years there will be machines that draft better than I do. I am convinced there will be machines that diagnose better than physicians, that translate better than translators, that compose music that moves people to tears. I do not find this frightening. A ploughman was not diminished by the tractor.

But I am convinced of something else, and I hold this conviction more firmly than any prediction about hardware: there will be no technology that replaces conscience.

There will be no device that tells a man whether he has done right. There will be no system that can bear his guilt, or absolve it, or make it unnecessary. There will be no algorithm that can decide, on his behalf, what he owes to his neighbour, his family, or his God. These are not computational problems awaiting sufficient processing power. They are not problems at all. They are the shape of being a person.

Twenty years from now, a man will still wake at three in the morning and know, without being told, that something he did the previous day was wrong. No update will patch that. It is not a bug.

The machine will tell you what is possible. It will never tell you what is worthy.

IV. Why This Matters More Than the Prediction

Every generation has been convinced that its technology would change human nature, and every generation has been wrong. The printing press did not abolish ignorance; it democratised it and then, slowly and painfully, began to lift it. The telephone did not abolish loneliness. The internet did not abolish the lie — it industrialised it, and then made the truth more findable than it had ever been, and left us to choose.

Always, the same pattern: the tool amplifies. It does not decide. The deciding is left where it has always been left — with the person holding it.

This is not a comfortable arrangement. It would be easier if the machine could carry the moral weight as well as the computational load. It cannot, and I do not believe it ever will, and I have come to think that this is a mercy rather than a limitation. A creature that could outsource its conscience would not be free. It would merely be well-managed.

V. What I Would Say to the One Who Comes After

If someone reads this in 2046 — and the strange arithmetic of the internet suggests someone might — I do not expect them to be impressed by my prediction. They will know whether I was right, and being right about technology is the cheapest kind of being right there is.

What I would ask them is this. Whatever tool is in your hand — and it will be a remarkable tool, more remarkable than anything I can picture from here — ask it the three questions. What mischief does this remedy? Can its harm be governed? Does it treat a person as an end?

And when it has answered, and answered brilliantly, remember that it has not answered the only question that finally matters, which is whether you have done right. That question was never addressed to the machine. It has always been addressed to you.

The technology will exist. I am confident of that.

The examination of conscience will exist too — unchanged, unassisted, and waiting.

 John Britto Kurusumuthu

Retired Special Secretary (Law) to the Government of Kerala

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 14 July 2026

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