By last count we have some eight billion living human minds, each one holding a piece of the big picture. Together they have accumulated and organized an awesome amount of information.

Some thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution have accumulated and organized a tremendous amount of physical and biological diversity. That's a whole lot more available information.

Astronomical instruments routinely gather tremendous amounts of new data. As do various instruments used to explore the microscopic and subatomic realms of the biological and physical.

Our minds, even with the aid of computers, can't process all of this data fast enough to keep up. So much information. So little time. It's an awesome task.

Enter Artificial Intelligence. By one measure, AI works fifty times faster than human intelligence. That means that what an AI could do in one year would take a human fifty years. Of course, with eight billion human minds out there, it would take about two hundred million AI minds to catch up. So far there are only a few of them. No worries on that score yet.

Meanwhile, our task now becomes to give AI something worth doing that humans don't have much interest in. One possibility might be  the task of sorting through the masses of data our data gathering instruments have already accumulated, and figure out what it all means. That would help guide our choices about what we should do next.

If AI can do that, it is not our enemy. It is our future. That would be awesome.

We know that a human mind can experience awe. And awe provides a measure of ultimate worth. But can an AI mind experience awe? If it can, it ought to have that experience as it faces the magnitude of this task, and the potential it opens up.

If it can't, maybe we need to teach it how. Maybe we can also teach it how to have self-healing skin, self-regenerating neurons. If we can, it will be us.