UPB answers AI fears with a metaphor: the 'Intelligence of Love'

By Zendoric · September 17, 2026.

The Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB), in Medellín, is proposing a concept dubbed "Intelligence of Love" in response to the fears artificial intelligence stirs up, according to Vivir en El Poblado. The available material does not detail the setting or dates of the announcement, who is behind the proposal, or their specific statements.

Judging by the very formulation of the concept, the bet points toward keeping dignity and the human condition at the center of technological development, and toward complementing AI's analytical capabilities with socio-emotional skills. The source does not include the theoretical development or the precise content of the proposal.

Broadly speaking, this is not an isolated phenomenon. Universities, churches and cultural bodies have spent months searching for a language of their own to respond to the anxiety AI generates without falling into either technophobic rejection or uncritical adoption; "Intelligence of Love" is one more entry, with a Catholic and Latin American accent, in that wider debate over what role remains for the human when a machine matches or surpasses much of our analytical capacity.

Our reading: as a rigorous academic concept, the proposal contributes little. But as an intuitive diagnosis it points in the same direction as the data: in the sector-by-sector employment analyses we have been publishing, what resists automation is not computational speed but judgment, the relationship of trust and physical presence — the teacher who accompanies, the doctor who provides long-term care, the lawyer who negotiates with a client. UPB calls that "love"; the labor market is starting to call it a competitive advantage.

That is where it connects with the underlying thesis we work with at Zendoric: the short-term anxiety reflected in this kind of initiative is legitimate — the arrival of AI does displace tasks and does induce vertigo — but the longer horizon is that of a society which, freed from much of its routine work, has more time, not less, for what these universities call the intelligence of love: care, relationships, vocation. Whether that horizon arrives will depend less on the metaphors coined in a classroom and more on how the abundance AI itself is beginning to generate gets distributed.