There are more than 40,000 words in Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas so there is little chance that many will actually read it. So, it is perhaps fitting that the main focus of interest in the encyclical is on Chapter 3, ‘Technology and Dominance’ which deals in particular with the impact of Artificial Intelligence.
Magnifica Humanitas has been published 135 years after Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum which is regarded, and which the current Pontiff refers to, as a foundational document in the framing of the ‘social doctrine’ of the Church and Catholic social teaching.
Rerum Novarum and Quadragesima Anno (1931), along with other encyclicals specifically directed at the growth of totalitarianism in the 1930s, were the Church’s attempt to reconcile the conflicting forces of unshackled free market capitalism and collectivism. Or more precisely, to show how both were inimical to the Common Good – the central focus being the dignity of the individual human person and the family as the foundation of an order based on communities rooted in tradition, work, private property and self-governance to the greatest extent that is possible in the modern world.
While all that might sound happy clappy stuff, the neglect of such principles – which have been the foundation of the western Christian order for centuries – has unleashed countless horrors. Those principles came out of the rebuilding of order after the defeat of barbarism following the downfall of Rome. They were the last valid resistance to the barbarism of unbridled capitalism and state totalitarianism. And they may well be the last line of resistance to the latest assaults on that order.
The current Pope has himself attracted the opprobrium of those who clearly believe that if they and their allies want to unleash war for the basest of reasons then no-one has the right to question them. Anyone who does is labelled an unlikely hybrid ‘Islamo Marxist’ or some other nonsensical epithet coined by a semi-illiterate on social media.
This will all be wrapped up in a lucky bag heresy called ‘Judaeo Christianity’ which even some Catholics who ought to know better have adopted from the Protestant sects in the States. It is bolstered by an overweening hatred of people who have a perfect right to live as they wish in their own lands.
It is an ideology that is unable to distinguish between wishing for the destruction of Islam and the proper concerns over limiting immigration and the influence of Islamic culture within western societies themselves.
There is a moral and intellectual chasm between the latter and embarking on wars of destruction and ‘regime change’ against countries and peoples who most likely would present no threat if left to their own devices.
One of the fundamentals of Catholicism is the sanctity of life including that of the unborn child. I have yet to hear any ‘Judaeo Christian’ reconcile that trope with the diametrically opposing attitudes to abortion among two of the ‘great world religions’ in contrast to the other. Way above their pay grade one suspects.
But back to Artificial Intelligence …
Leo uses the Biblical analogy of the Tower of Babel to pose the question, vis-a- vis AI, “What are we building?” Is it part of creating a world in which “the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions?” Allied to those old and baser motivations of wealth and power is a new fallacy that the Pope addresses under “labels of transhumanism and posthumanism.”
“Those perspectives form the ideological background present in some centres 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.”
All of this has powerful advocates, and they pitch this futuristic vision as the promise of technology – and in particular AI – as containing the solution to all of our problems: not only resources and poverty but even mortality and happiness.
It is the same fallacy of the perfectibility of the human race that has ever underlain all such visions and excused all manner of horrors because they could be justified on the basis that the glorious end of universal happiness and a ‘Better World’ would be ultimately justified by the means employed to get there.
As Leo succinctly puts it: “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.”
We have already seen how this amoral view of the Universe has played out over the millennia where various races and ethnicities and castes and subcategories of humans have been consigned to slavery or in some cases complete eradication from the face of the earth.
In our own time we have seen the dehumanisation of the unborn human being extended to the elderly and the ‘disabled’ and even the ‘depressed’ and ‘inadequate’ who some advocates of euthanasia believe can be put down like a dog once it has been legislated for and legitimised.
Ah but surely AI could never become a tool of such malign forces. Really? Perhaps look at how it is already being deployed in the most perfect totalitarian state known to humanity in the People’s Republic of China, the model for an increasing number of the disciples of technological hegemony.
AI, according to the Disciples, will create a world in which all human needs will be met with the minimum of human effort. The exponential growth in productivity and the solution to resources scarcity and distribution will mean that the whole of humankind will live in a manner undreamt of by the most sensuous of Emperors, General Secretaries and CEOs.
Our recorded and remembered history ought to give us pause. Where human beings are rendered ‘redundant’ by technological or other means, the pattern on the part of those with power and wealth has not been to ‘mind’ them but to get rid of them.
If that tendency to deal harshly with those ‘surplus to requirements’ is embedded in a flawed human nature, is it likely to be enhanced, as the Pope puts it, by “entrusting an algorithm in practice with the power to select who is worthy or not,” and in that way to “to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities.”
The great justification on the part of the monsters of the past was mostly that they were mere agents of ‘the motive forces of history.’ The reality may have been shoving people into ovens or shooting them in the back of the head in the basement of the Lubyanka prison. For those responsible that sordid evil paled when set against why such horrors were necessary.
Killing people for their own good or for the greater good of Humanity or the Class or the Race. What separates that mentality from the mindset of those who would not only abort the ‘intellectually disabled’ but feel that it is okay to put them down at any time after birth? Once it is legal obviously. Otherwise, you are just John Wayne Gacy or Fred West with a Phd.
Such pessimism on my part might appear to be a rather long stretch from discussing the implications of a world which is rapidly coming to be dominated by Artificial Intelligence. As the Pope states, it is not the potential benefits of the technology itself but the use to which it will be put and more importantly the ‘values’ of those who will control it, that requires vigilance.
Those values increasingly are shaped by a mentality in which “Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”
A huge part of that unique problem-solving capacity of the human race is the centrality of work/labour. We have created our world through work of all kinds from tending animals, to growing crops, curing disease, building sewerage systems, hospitals, schools, airplanes, computers and the whole multitude of technologies.
The question is – has humanity now created in AI a technology that might make such ingenuity and labour redundant? And if it does, what happens to the ‘spare’ humans who once performed the tasks that can be programmed to be carried out by a machine? And what do we do if we have no need to have responsibility for our own well-being and those connected to us by family, community and a common humanity?
Those are the questions that need to be answered, and the Papal encyclical poses them in a manner that only a few have to date.