I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, (Deut. 30:19)
With these words in his final address to them Moses exhorts the Israelites to remain faithful to their covenant with God for to do so is to assure life for them and for their descendants. To ignore the covenant is to choose death. This exhortation by the Great Lawgiver comes to mind as one learns this week of the issuance of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’.
The theme of this 42,000-word document is the Church’s primary social teaching on artificial intelligence. Essentially, in response to the growing influence A.I. has in our lives, the Holy Father calls for appropriate ethical and political oversight to safeguard human dignity and the common good. Technology should serve people rather than “subject them to the algorithms of sheer power”. A.I. magnifies the ‘digital divide’ in the world and subjects even more those who have no access to it to the control of those who have. Worse, if unbridled, A.I. threatens human relationships, and relationships are foundational to human nature. In his encyclical Pope Leo warns us about the efficiency of A.I.: “when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion” (MH 112).
Even for those of us who are superficially aware of A.I.’s expanding role in our lives, it is clear that, depending on how we use it, it has the potential either to diminish or to enhance our personal agency, our ability and willingness to initiate and to act. In the case of diminishment, technology assumes tasks for us and we allow ourselves to succumb to the resulting inactivity and reduced human interaction. In the case of enhancement, we take advantage of the ‘freed-up time” to expand and strengthen our human interaction.
Human interactions are the ligaments that build the Body of Christ. In his letter to the Ephesians St. Paul writes: From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work (Eph. 4:16). Philanthropy is a quintessential manifestation of human interaction. We can hope that as the constructive use of A.I. leads to a wealthier society and one with more ‘leisure time’ for involving ourselves in the lives of others, the level of our philanthropy will increase. A destructive use of A.I. would, of course, have calamitous consequences.
What would the Great Lawgiver say? Is artificial intelligence a blessing or a curse? Our response will affect the advance of the Kingdom.