CONCEPT
The Calling and the Specialist Without Spirit
Weber's Beruf — the calling — and his closing prophecy of Fachmenschen ohne Geist (specialists without spirit), now realized by AI tools that answer the calling on the builder's behalf.
The Beruf — the calling — designated in its Protestant origin the specific sphere of activity to which God had called each individual believer. The faithful discharge of the calling was itself a form of worship. The secularized calling — career as vocation, profession as identity — retains the structure without the content: it demands the same devotion while offering none of the original justification. AI disrupts the secular calling in a historically unprecedented way by demonstrating that the calling can be answered by a machine. The specific tasks through which the builder, lawyer, or physician experienced her vocation can now be performed by algorithms. What Weber warned against at the close of The Protestant Ethic — Fachmenschen ohne Geist, Genussmenschen ohne Herz, specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart — is produced at scale by the tools that amplify technical capacity while hollowing the engagement that originally made the capacity meaningful.
