If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.
Much of the encyclical involves defending the proposition that the Vatican ought to be—and has always been—engaged in making statements about new and very worldly things like artificial intelligence. “The Church is present in history and engages in dialogue with the world,” Leo argues. He agrees with the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world that humanity stands at a crossroads. But at this crossroads, he argues, three questions must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Invoking a Biblical story about hubris, the building of the Tower of Babel, he warns of what he calls the “Babel syndrome”: “namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
Beginning with the fundamental dignity of the human, Leo traces the inalienable, universal equality of persons and their inviolable rights. He establishes, within the Church’s Social Doctrine (traceable to “Rerum Novarum”), principles that include the commitment to the common good, which he defines as “the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.” Revisiting Pope Francis’s “Laudati Si’ ” (“Praise Be to You”), a 2015 encyclical that called for the protection of the environment, “our common home,” Leo bemoans the rise of the “technocratic paradigm,” or “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions.” Here, about halfway through the encyclical, he arrives at the problem of artificial intelligence, which he takes pains to distinguish from human intelligence: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.” However valuable this tool may be, he argues, it has been developed heedlessly, endangering both “our common home” and our common humanity.
The problem is not the technology, the Pope maintains in “Magnifica Humanitas”; it’s the anthropology. Algorithms, forms of automation, and artificial intelligence sort the worthy from the unworthy; they manipulate information and undermine trust; they violate privacy; they enhance the power of the already powerful and reduce the capabilities of the already vulnerable; they make war more ruthless; they undermine democratic governance; they take away the dignity of work, possibly for the mass of humanity. He presses for forms of regulation and especially for democratic control of artificial intelligence, but above all he calls for “disarming” A.I. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” he writes. “It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” He worries that the culture around artificial intelligence undermines the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence.
The Pope’s litany of concerns differs little from those that have been raised by serious commentators for decades, especially in the United States, where automation was earliest advanced and where its dangers were earliest perceived, as I argue in a forthcoming book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” The term “artificial intelligence” was coined the year the Pope was born, in 1955, and the malign consequences that simulating—or even surpassing—human intelligence could have on human dignity, equality, and freedom, along with the dangers of replacing the functions of democratic governments with automated systems, were already being noticed. In 1957, Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition” that “a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial,’ toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature,” and wondered whether humans would one day soon “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.” As early as 1962, Americans were already wondering whether they lived in a “cybernation”; soon, the fear of an “automated state” had been named. In 1967, in “The Myth of the Machine,” the American critic and New Yorker writer Lewis Mumford lamented the rise of “cybernetic intelligence,” warning that “instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.” Mumford described technological determinism as “a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development,” a mistaken belief that had to be abandoned “if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanized culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations.”
