AI Is a Question About Everything
Some Notes on the Recent Papal Encylical Magnifica Humanitatis
AI is a question about how we organize our lives, educate children, work, and all the rest.
Breaking Down Magnifica Humanitatis
To begin, pour yourself a beverage of choice, and sit down with the document itself. I read it poolside with coffee, but to each their own1.
This Monday, a seismic event in the world of Christian moral reflection occurred: a new encyclical appeared2.
If you had asked me five years ago whether the Pope would have written on artificial intelligence, it would have been a hard no, not only because Francis was much more attuned to fairly traditional questions of ecology, social conflict, and love, but because we weren’t really talking about AI in general. To talk about AI in 2021 would be akin to Dwight Schrute praddling on about cyborgs and Battlestar Galactica, a lone voice crying in the wilderness3.
But within a few short years, data centers are littering the landscape—literally, littering. You also cannot literally use the largest search engines on the Internet without having AI-assistants foisted upon you. Every week, I receive emails on how to integrate AI into my courses, or how to make use of AI in side hustles; my disciplinary conference in January is entirely devoted to the question of AI4.
And so, this week, Pope Leo XIV’s first major writing of his pontificate is…kind of on artificial intelligence? More properly, though, the document is on AI as a kind of marker of how the world we have constructed has shifted: the way technology mediates the world to us and to one another has changed, and it must be addressed in a way congruent with the light of Scripture.
The document opens up with an account of Catholic Social Teaching—the tradition of papal commentary on pressing social questions in light of the Gospel. The very first of these documents—the 1891 Rerum Novarum—was on labor, and the rights and responsibilities of workers and owners alike, in light of what it means to be humans in God’s world. This present work takes up that mantle, by asking how in the 21st century, work has changed once again, and what it means for the Church to faithfully address the conditions of the world.
From there, Magnifica lays out the foundational social-ethical commitments (the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, and justice) which have framed Catholic teaching since the beginning. For those unfamiliar with these terms, these are all shorthand terms of what kind of world God has given to us to live in, and what it means for us to live in it wisely and in accordance to the revelation of Scripture5.
Only then does the document actually get into the question of technology, and—relative to the size of the document—spends little time on the ins and outs of AI technology itself. You’ll find no reference to Anthropic, Google, particular theories of AI, or anything like that; it does not get into debates over newsy stories or engage in polemics about Elon Musk’s anti-human aspirations. What it does do is treat AI as a jumping off point for how the world—the work we do, the way in which we relate to one another, and the dynamics of power in the world—are shifting quickly.
Ultimately, this is not a document laying out a vision for the use of technology, but a document which establishes what humans are and need, and only then, asks what it means for technology to be a part of that world. It’s remarkably refreshing in this way. Frequently, before technologists create a new technology, they build an inevitability machine, that whatever is created not only should but will be adopted. But Leo will have none of that: humanity will go on, regardless of whether Anthropic goes bankrupt, and we have to recover that more fundamental vision first of what it means to be a human in God’s world.
AI as a Question About the World and All That Is In It
Once we shift our gaze away from “how do I interact with AI” to “how does AI illuminate the challenge of being human”, a whole range of issues present themselves. Primary among these, Magnifica states, is the power dynamic which the world is soaked in: when wee see that AI and its creation is in the hands of a few, it highlights the ways in which so much of our world resembles this. One doesn’t have to squint too hard to see totalitarian governments, corrupt oligarchies, technocrats, and anti-democratic regimes in the mirror.
But beyond this, the document illuminates the ways in which the rise of technology (and AI in particular) has made it so much harder to know when someone is speaking truthfully or when they are not. Beyond the lack of nuance which texting provides, there has been a rise of the use of AI to produce break-up notes, term papers, and God help us, our current government’s legal briefs.
The encyclical moves from there to the manifold ways that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly aspect of our lives. The rise of AI has thrown into chaos the way that educators think about educational processes6, online courses, and writing assignments. The mass adoption by businesses has upended entry-level jobs for an entire generation, has made help desks even more inhuman, and has made workers even more reliant on technologies they couldn’t hope to repair themselves.
Technological mediation (and AI in particular) have likewise upended warfare, contributing dramatically to the dehumanizing of potential targets: the targets are now generated by algorithims not designed to exercise judgment or prudence, much less mercy. In a breathtaking admission, the framework of the just war is called into question because of the new developments:
It is in this context that humanity is slipping into a violent culture of power, where peace no longer appears as a responsibility to be taken on, but as a fragile interval between conflicts. Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. [182] Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness. The use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.
The question that these proliferated challenges should raise for us is nothing less than this:
When the inevitable technologically-mediated future promises so breathlessly to make it so impossible for humans to remain human—in our relationships, our education, our work, and even our conflict—we really must ask what in God’s name we should be doing. For a slower world in which I have to think my way through difficult problems, puzzle through the mystery of another person, and tarry patiently with student ignorance is surely not a worse one than the one Sam Altman is building.
The best way to weed through the hysteria is to actually read the thing. No shortcuts to understanding, I’m afraid.
For the relevant distinctions on what exactly this kind of writing is, and how it differs from other things that a Pope might author, I highly commend this explainer.
Dwight wasn’t wrong about Battlestar.
Don’t get me started. Not only is this incredibly presentist in a way that I hate—devoting our precious time and energy to one cultural phenomenon—but it will invite my discipine to continue to not ask basic questions about what the moral life is. And those are really the only questions my guild should be asking: literally no one cares when the SCE writes a public letter on anything.
To see the way in which these terms are understood, I refer you here. You will note that this is a serious document, narrating the Scriptures and what a Christian vision of life in the world looks like in light of God’s redeeming work.
As much as our government would like to automate all education, I would like to point out that books are remarkably resilient to EMPs, computer viruses, and ransomware. I get that he doesn’t read anything, but again, what does he know?