The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It - The New Atlantis

The main text of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on humanity in the age of artificial intelligence, opens with two biblical images of building. The first is ambitious, gleaming, rationalizing, and maximizing. It is the Tower of Babel. The other is humbled, limping, uncertain, and diffuse. It is a scene from the book of Nehemiah, where the prophet assigns each family of Jerusalem a section of the wall to rebuild. The same choice is before us, Pope Leo believes: to build Babel or Jerusalem, a “culture of power” or a “civilization of love.”

There is, of course, no one that Silicon Valley loves more than a “builder” and nothing, ever since the word first escaped containment in its cramped wet market of ideas, that it loves more than the builder’s agency. This has not prevented techno-optimists from adopting a posture of anxious passivity with regard to artificial intelligence. AI is a train, and you can get out of its way or let it mow you down. AI is a ship, and you can scuttle up the gangplank before it sails or be abandoned to the gnashing and wailing of the permanent underclass. You need to incorporate agents into your workflows, not just in cases where they demonstrably solve some problem for you, but so you can keep up, so you can engage, so you can compete, so you can speak the new language of the new world, so you can scramble for some advantage on the margins: so you don’t get left behind.

Pope Leo ranges himself against this kind of disciplinary pseudorealism in political questions of all types. But when it comes to AI specifically, the encyclical whiffs an obvious opportunity.

In a section on education, Pope Leo nods to a striking feature of LLMs: that the major ethical struggle they provoke does not revolve around how they are designed (with all due respect to every company currently posting open positions for a neuroscientist who reads Marcus Aurelius) or what we will do with the powers they bestow, but whether society will be able to successfully identify, stake out, and defend the territory of human life where their use is inappropriate:

This is a fundamental issue because every technology shapes those who use it. Educating people about the use of AI, then, involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used.

How strange, then, and how frustrating, that a treatment of AI chatbots can muster only the most timid and qualified of corrections:

The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.

Artificial friends aren’t verboten, exactly — in fact, they can be “at times genuinely helpful.” The problem is not fundamental, not ineradicably present in the choice to socialize with a machine, but occurs only in the “danger” of a “risky” activity — especially for “less discerning users.”

Our natural affections require proper objects, and even our lowest forms of animal sociality are scaffolding for an encounter with another immortal human soul. To seek the pleasures and comforts that attend human connection — or even the unequal but genuine companionship of a dog — in the manufactured simulacra of a human mind is grotesquely disordered. It is grotesquely disordered no matter how sophisticated an understanding of neural networks accompanies it.

The more lonely and vulnerable someone is, the less “discerning” they are, the more they will benefit from clear, concrete, unambiguous guardrails protecting the domains where AI agents must not be welcomed. But this is exactly what Magnifica Humanitas had the opportunity, and failed, to provide.

Pope Leo is not in any way indifferent to the protection of these domains. He insists that a statistical model cannot assume moral responsibility and therefore cannot judge in a true sense; it must never authorize lethal actions in war. But he is most interested in what might be called macro concerns: war, displaced workers, the opacity of algorithms, and above all, the ratcheting concentration of power in the hands of a few that the private development and ownership of AI tools enables.

None of these issues is unimportant. But if coordinated action only concerns itself with the macro — if AI ownership, design, and weaponization become the object of policy and the focus of resistance, while use at a granular level is left to the discernment and discipline of the individual — then the most salient and dangerous fact about AI will have been ignored.

What is difficult, what is confounding, about our current moment is that, since the advent of the smartphone, we have been subject to powerful technologies of default, technologies of ubiquity. The crucial decision is not whether to amass and deploy, as in the nuclear era. Nor is it how to apportion the infrastructure that will determine the possibility horizon for future generations, as with the rise of the automobile. Most of the chronic civilizational damage that every day becomes harder to deny takes place in billions of diffuse moments without momentous stakes. The phone is everywhere; the phone is woven into the fabric of your social networks; the phone is useful for a hundred little tasks of everyday life. And there is nothing actually morally wrong or damaging, in any isolated moment, with taking the phone out of the pocket to while away five minutes.

By the time we looked up and realized that by repeatedly defaulting to a new habitus of engagement with the world we had allowed the phone to utterly transform it in ways we largely abhorred, it was too late for anything but rearguard action.

With AI, we have a chance to learn from and correct our mistakes. If we fail to pass the test a second time, there is every indication that the results will be even more catastrophic.

“Teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used” will not be enough. Because we are dealing with technologies of ubiquity, only communities — with their power to embed alternative defaults in a shared life, to offer alternative social networks and create unambiguous guardrails through social norms — will constitute meaningful units of resistance to the worst of AI’s possible effects on our habits of thought, judgment, communication, and conviviality.

There are important policy interventions on the table, especially regarding young people’s exposure to AI in pedagogical contexts and at formative times in their life. Strong stances from the major mainstream institutions of American life would also be wonderful. But I suspect there is little point in waiting around for either D.C. or Harvard to lead the way.

We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.

This, I think, is where Magnifica Humanitas will prove most inspired and invaluable in the years to come. Regardless of whether the powers that be heed the pope’s injunctions and warnings, that striking opening image will be available to all the faithful, and to every person of goodwill. If you find yourself in a ruin, staring at the crumbling remnants of a wall and the world it protected, what do you do? You assemble your people, you stake out a section, and you start to build.