Last fall, the Notre Dame philosopher, Meghan Sullivan, participated in a closed-door meeting at the Vatican. She was there to discuss AI ethics with a group of religious thinkers, academics, and leading members of the technology industry.
As Sullivan recalls in a recent newsletter, she attended an optional Catholic Mass the first morning, held in an ancient church. She was surprised to see one of the tech leaders sitting a few rows away in the pews. “[This was] the kind of guy you typically see in a black t-shirt and chinos,” she writes. “That morning he was dressed in a brown suit and tie, quietly taking in the sanctuary as the first rays of morning light filled the room.”
After the service concluded, they chatted. The tech leader, it turned out, was not Catholic. When Sullivan asked him why he was here, he gave the following answer:
“We’re building something that is going to change life as we know it. I want to make sure I keep in touch with what humans have always cared about. This is a place that takes care of those values.”
I found this interaction chilling. Not because of what it says about potential AI disruptions, but because of what it tells us about the engineers developing this technology.
The AI industry is suffused with a religious fervor. As Elizabeth Lopatto recently pointed out, they’ve stopped trying to build useful products and are focusing instead on “inventing the future.” This puts these companies in the dual role of priest and prophet, frantically trying to appease the digital deity they imagine they’ve summoned, all the while warning the masses of its impending holy wrath.
I understand this attraction. This all must be terribly exciting and life-affirming for that executive in his brown suit. He gets to be Aaron and Amos all at once.
But not everyone is willing to go along with this game…
Last week, Pope Leo XIV released a 42,000-word encyclical, ”Magnifica Humanitas,” in response to the challenges of artificial intelligence. I’m still digesting the full document, but early summaries indicate that the Pope is not ready to meekly acquiesce to the AI future that we’ve been told is inevitable.
Consider the following key exhortation from the encyclical:
“With the heart of a shepherd and a father, I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty, and the world once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.”
Tools should be useful. Tools should help people’s lives and build up the “common good.” Tools are what technology companies should seek to create.
When AI leaders resignedly shake their heads, and talk about the need for the government to provide guaranteed income once their AI models automate all work, or eagerly describe a future in which we live happily alongside “machines of loving grace,” this is not forward-looking pragmatism; it’s hubris. A new Tower of Babel built out of GPUs.
Thankfully, in recent weeks, there has been a marked shift in how technology executives talk about AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called BS on executives claiming they’re laying people off due to AI, calling the excuse “lazy” and “just a way for them to sound smart.” Perhaps even more surprising, just last week, Sam Altman admitted he had been “pretty wrong” about his previous predictions that AI would automate large numbers of jobs.
These shifts in tone are likely more about PR damage control than a legitimate change of heart. But it’s still good to see. Leave the religion to the Pope; I want my technology executives focused on building things people actually want.
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As An Aside
I think it’s telling that one of the articles I read summarizing the Pope’s new encyclical casually and confidently made the following points:
- “A.I. has already displaced many entry-level jobs.”
- “Mass automation of both white collar work and blue collar work is likely to significantly reshape most sectors of the labor market.”
This is pretty shocking, as neither of these claims is widely accepted. And now, as mentioned, many leading AI CEOs have come out to push back on these specific talking points.
I’m not sure that tech leaders realize just how much anxiety and fear they spread during the period in which they were cosplaying as solemn x-risk sages. This is a p(doom) genie that might take a while to put back in its bottle.
Perhaps it’s unrelated, but I’m reading Theo Baker’s “How to Rule the World,” and I think it provides a valuable, informed, first-person account of the toxic mindset that drives the AI techno-oligarchs.
“This puts these companies in the dual role of priest and prophet, frantically trying to appease the digital deity they imagine they’ve summoned, all the while warning the masses of its impending holy wrath.”
Such a well-written sentence! Bravo!
I am wondering if the whole AI thing is just a BIG marketing plan (con game) designed to try to get investors to give AI companies free money that they can throw into the fire in the attempt to get AI to actually do something worthwhile. The quote “We’re building something that is going to change life as we know it. I want to make sure I keep in touch with what humans have always cared about. This is a place that takes care of those values” just sounds to me like THIS IS BIG YALL, YOU NEED TO INVEST NOW! GIVE US MONEY!
The Catholic Church’s position should be to invest in humans. God created the mind, and it shouldn’t be replaced by data centers making humans intellectual slaves to companies.
I’m glad your reaction to the techbro visiting the church was as negative as mine. I suppose you could spin it as “he’s trying to stay grounded!” But instead it seems very cynical and condescending, like he wants to go and see what it’s like for “common people.”
Take a look at a few of C.S. Lewis’ works: The Abolition of Man, That Hideous Strength, and The Poison of Subjectivism. His question is about how the universe is designed, about what our place in it is, and about what are means and what are ends within all that. Abolition is short and dismantles the “pure materialism” view. He calls Hideous Strength an adult fairy tale (do not be misled) and shows how spiritual sovereignty works. Poison shows that hubris can’t work.
Am I the only person who is genuinely excited about AI having the *potential* to eventually transform culture (especially American culture) to be considerably less focused around WORK?
I’ve historically been lucky to have jobs that I enjoy, but from what I can tell, this is the exception, not the rule. My sense is that most people — if they’re being honest — would admit to prefer not having to work to put food on the table.
Why can’t we as a society spend more time and emotional/intellectual effort thinking about and planning towards a post-work society?!
The Trucking business is one of the largest employers in the world, and it’s clear that soon autonomous vehicles will be able to, er, truck far more safely & efficiently than humans. The handwringers are screaming “we must protect all jobs!” while I’m sitting here thinking, hey, with autonomous vehicles we’ll see a steep decrease in the *40,000+* YEARLY car-related deaths in the U.S.!
Yeah, genAI has got a mixed record right now for work efficiency, and robotics on the whole has a long way to go. But it seems like incredible head-in-sandism to argue that these technologies will not be able to do MOST of our jobs better than we can… perhaps even in the next 10 years!
So do you really think we should be expending so much effort *protecting jobs* right now vs. planning for what’s coming? Bandaid’ing vs. architecting, no? I increasingly lack faith in our ability to make hard and long-term-focused choices, but I still hold out hope…!
Given mankind’s general lack of response to the threat of global warming over the past couple decades (at least), I have serious doubts we’ll successfully stop any runaway AI trains.
“Am I the only person who is genuinely excited about AI having the *potential* to eventually transform culture (especially American culture) to be considerably less focused around WORK?”
100 years ago economists already predicted that we will work 15 hours a week. This does not happen. People (unfortunately) always want more, to protect their status in society or to ascend in status. We already have enough technology to work less, but it doesn’t happen.
“it’s clear that soon autonomous vehicles will be able to, er, truck far more safely & efficiently than humans”
Is it? I heard this already 10 years ago, and it doesn’t happen.
At least there is evidence for THIS deity.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
-Dr. Ian Malcolm