Abstract:

The International Council of Nurses 2025 updated definition of nursing describes it as a profession dedicated to upholding everyone’s right to the highest attainable standard of health and committed to social justice across the life span. Meanwhile， artificial intelligence（AI） has entered nursing practice at scale，yet nursing education has responded largely at the level of technical integration，leaving a more fundamental ontological question unaddressed：under this expanded mandate，where does the nurse’s irreplaceability as a professional subject actually reside? Harmony Nursing Theory，whose dual track of he（a supportive relational climate in which people within the system feel well），the cognitive，affective and interpersonal investment of persons，and xie（the sound and proportionate structuring of the system’s components，mechanisms and institutions），the institutional pathway of implementation，fits the nurse-AI relationship better than theories centred on the environment’s direct effect on health；yet its premise that xie operates upon a passive system no longer holds once agentic AI generates coordination preferences of its own. Therefore，on the basis of proposing three conceptual extensions to this theory，the paper responds to a normative proposition：nurses should serve as the moral measure of whether AI outputs remain humane，and interprets the irreplaceability of nurses as three embodied dimensions covering the full-life course：whole-person embodied beholding，moral advocacy for health justice，and existential accompaniment across life stages. Three reforms of nursing education are proposed：curricula that foster ontological caring capacity，structurally integrating critical AI literacy，and cultivating the institutional awareness needed to prevent automation compliance from eroding clinical judgement.

Key words: Artificial Intelligence, Nurse’s Role, Nursing Philosophy, Nursing Ethics, Education, Nursing, Harmony Nursing Theory