Pope Leo XIV will publish his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” next Monday, May 25. The pope has indicated that he will address some of the principal preoccupations weighing on his pastoral mind and heart in this document, which has been widely anticipated within the church and beyond. We can expect from his past writings that he will offer a measured account of the challenges and opportunities artificial intelligence technology poses, speaking from within the broader tradition of Catholic teaching and thinking, and will encourage a global conversation about the kinds of decisions we need to make to meet these challenges humanely.
The human challenge
Decisions are human things, and for that reason moral things as well. Before we cede to technology important aspects of human decision making, we need to think about the human factor, and its authority over the metrics of informational data.
The urgency of our situation is tied to the quiet integration, largely by unseen hands, of data-driven metrics into the stream of decision making. There are great advantages to rapid access to data; however, measuring data is not the same as a human decision, and statistical analysis by itself does not yield prudence and wisdom. A simple example: My G.P.S. can tell me the fastest way to my desired destination; this is its de facto response to my having entered the address into the program. But only I can decide whether the beauty of the drive is of greater importance than the efficiency of the route.
The example is an elementary one, yet consider programming that collates information about what constitutes a legitimate military target, or who is eligible for food assistance or a major surgery. The program will collate as it is programmed to do, but what are the criteria utilized for the program? And who decides that?
Part of the mystique of artificial intelligence is the aura of objective authority that surrounds the information generated. It is not the case, however, that objectivity is itself the arbiter of truth about the human good. The human subject normatively makes decisions in terms of their impact on human subjects. Justice, mercy and love are not programmable; they are humanly discerned.
We cannot be reduced to objective mathematical metrics, to the sum total of the data. We are the subjective authors and perceivers of the metric collations we create and consider. We consider them, but may have good human reasons to choose something other than what the metric produces. The narrative around objective data is useful for marketing purposes, but behind the program, there is a remote editor of criteria: It could be an elf, or it could be an orc, but the human reality remains. We must choose criteria wisely, and we must know when to leave the program and simply think and pray about our decisions.
The machine can replace our humanity only if we allow it to first reduce our sense of ourselves to whatever we program the machine to do. It would be like willingly sealing the human horizon within a prism of our own making. We want to consider the prism, not reduce ourselves to it.
The Catholic Conversation
Ironically, the first thing many will do upon the publication of the Holy Father’s encyclical is ask an artificial intelligence app for a summary of it. Those interested will read media summaries that may or may not have been generated from one of those apps. The news cycle will run, and the commentary on social media will multiply like side eddies in a larger stream, often propelled by talking points anonymously derived and deliberately disseminated to influence opinion on any number of particular aspects of what the pope will have said. Then interest will shift as other algorithms pull our attention to a different matrix of events, also administered to us by an ambiguous mix of anonymously derived sources. We have gotten used to this fairly quickly.
The challenges before us revolve around precisely this problem: The human voice is easily eclipsed and manipulated in our current environment. Generated summaries mixed with fabricated or truncated excerpts inevitably flatten discourses, manufacture rage and resolve themselves into mere statistical information about how many people agree or disagree with what they have heard. Meanwhile, we convince ourselves that we have digested the data and can move on. In this way, the timbre and tone of the human voice, of thought and the heartfelt, is eroded away within a programmed sense of what is important in a text, and what can be ignored without risk of losing the gist of the thing.
It is particularly important that Catholic media outlets try their level best to help the Holy Father be heard in his own voice. The words of the pope should not be reduced to a program of dogmatic definitions and generated summaries. For us, to think with the church cannot be separated from our attentiveness to the shepherd given to us by Christ. In our increasingly dehumanizing environment, the pope’s voice is a formative one, and it rightly signals for the whole church how the Gospel of Christ is also a Gospel that upholds and defends the dignity of the delicate human mystery.
Let us listen to him: Read carefully, think deeply and then pray from that place within where the WORD himself dwells. We have decisions to make.