On the use of AI, he urges us to reject the Babel model of progress without God
By Deacon Bob Hunt
Pope Leo XIV has released the first encyclical letter of his pontificate. Titled Magnifica humanitas (“Magnificent humanity” or MH), it is subtitled: “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the time of Artificial Intelligence.”
Some might take issue with the title. Is humanity so magnificent? But recall that the Catholic Church teaches, contrary to many of our separated brethren or the more cynical secularists, that the human person is basically good. Psalm 8:4-6 proclaims: “When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place—what is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than a god, crowned him with glory and honor.” Human nature is broken because of the Fall, which accounts for so much of man’s inhumanity to man and man’s poor treatment of animals, the earth, etc. But the human person is good.
Made in the image of God and renewed to His likeness by the waters of baptism, the dignity of what it means to be human has been raised by Christ in such a way that respect for the human dignity of all and even a healthy self-love are manifestations of God’s own desire to be reconciled and share His divine nature with humanity. “The glory of God is a living man,” said St. Irenaeus of Lyons, way back in the second century, “and the life of man consists in beholding God.”
The challenge of artificial intelligence (AI) is to remember the dignity of the human person, the social nature of human life, and the common good of all people in a world obsessed with ever-advancing technologies but not always with the ethical ramifications of those technologies. Pope Leo offers the analogy of Babel v. Jerusalem. At Babel, man desired progress without God. He wanted to build a tower to heaven to prove that he did not need God. Instead, the confusion of language God caused led them to division and stalemate at every point of progress. Punished for their vanity and presumption, they could no longer work together toward a common goal because that vision did not include a relationship with Him who creates and sustains all things.
Contrast this with the project to rebuild Jerusalem after the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonians and allowed the Jews, who had been captives in Babylon, to return to their homeland. Finding Jerusalem destroyed, Nehemiah went about building back the city. Being a leader and not a ruler, Nehemiah brought the entire community together to listen to ideas of what should be done and how it should be done, assigning each family its section of the wall to rebuild, all of it while acknowledging their dedication for God and asking His blessing on their work.
Nehemiah listened, trusting in the contributions of others to a shared project. In short order, Jerusalem was rebuilt and has served as the focal point of Jewish life for centuries, even to this day.
Pope Leo encourages us as we develop our technologies to reject the model offered by Babel of confusion wrought by goals originating in a self-centered, profit-oriented vision and adopt the model of cooperation, joint effort, and each respecting what the other brings to the project that exemplified Nehemiah’s style of leadership. And not to forget God! It is possible to truly advance in technology while respecting the inherent dignity of the human person and the search for the common good. Indeed, if we forget these, we seal our own doom.
In MH, Pope Leo cites several areas of concern regarding AI in relation to respect for the human person and community, including “a significant and rapid contraction in available jobs,” “Important and sensitive decisions … delegated to automated systems,” “AI systems present[ing] themselves as neutral and objective, [that] end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers,” the development of autonomous weapons systems and, most ominous of all, a fostering of the notion of “progress as surpassing the human condition, … grouped under the labels of transhumanism and posthumanism.
These perspectives,” Pope Leo points out with dismay, “form the ideological background present in some centers of technological power and occupy the collective imagination in a simplified form, especially in the media and on social networks. They tend to foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an ‘enhanced human being’ or ‘human-machine hybrid.’”
Hand-in-hand with the idea of “enhanced human beings” is that the natural limitations of human life—illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability—are regarded as defects to be corrected, ignoring that our humanity is often made most manifest when we are at the service of those in need, or even when we are the ones suffering. Our limitations are what bring out our compassion, our generosity, the experience of the spiritual, and the worship of God. “Mysteriously,” Pope Leo writes, “it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others, and encounter the presence of the Lord.”
People are not objects to be optimized or perfected. The Holy Father writes: “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.” In other words: eugenics.
The Second Person of the Holy Trinity emptied Himself and became man, like us in all things except sin. As Jesus Christ was the Son of the Father, by His grace we, too, can become children of God. We act like God’s children especially when we, in imitation of Christ who gave Himself for the sake of others, are moved to reach out to heal or mitigate the suffering of the poor, the hungry and thirsty, the naked and infirm, the incarcerated and the outcast. Our true destiny is to become children of God by embracing the grace won for us by Christ by His life, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. We are not made to perfect ourselves in some Promethean pipe dream, thinking that with better technologies we may conquer all that confines or bewails us. We are made by God and for God, and we can never hope to attain all that we were meant to be outside of a relationship with God. “Only in God is my soul at rest” (Psalms 62:2).
Humankind has always yearned for perfection, and we are called by Jesus to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). But the perfection our heavenly Father possesses is one of perfection in all truth, beauty, and goodness. It is the perfection of love and mercy, not of empowerment or enhancement. Humankind can benefit from AI and other technologies, so long as we remember that our fulfillment will not be in technological achievement that enhances our temporal lives but in sharing in the divine nature through the knowledge and power of Christ (2 Peter 1:4), according to His grace.
Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.
Deacon Bob Hunt is a husband, father, grandfather, and parishioner at All Saints Church in Knoxville.