Magnificent Humanity

Magnificent Humanity

 

 

In the early 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution gained traction in Britain, workers in Nottingham, England took to smashing the looms and knitting frames in the textile mills that employed them—often at starvation wages and in abysmal working conditions.

Called “Luddites,” these men threatened mill owners and even burned factories in protest over how mechanization was adversely affecting their lives and those of their families. Their hope was to halt the spread of these technologies and return to a more humane economy. The hangman’s noose and transportation to Australia quickly ended their counter-revolution, but their name remains among those of us who have a healthy suspicion of those who uncritically embrace seemingly every new innovation coming out of the Silicon Valley and other technological centers.

The reality is that while beneficial in many ways, technology as a whole has consistently made promises that it’s been unable to fully deliver. Smart phones, with their texting functions, were going to make our young people more literate as they would communicate with the written word more so than by voice. Any modern high school teacher will tell you that while students may be more proficient and quicker in typing as a result of this innovation, the quality of writing has diminished dramatically.

Social media would bring the world together. We were assured it would enable us to share our stories with one another and communicate across borders. It was going to help us to live as one. In fairness, social media has enabled people to keep up with each other over long distances and communicate in ways unimagined even 30 years ago. But at the same time, social media has become a vehicle for bullying and misrepresentation and spewing hatred. While logicians will remind us that “correlation is not causation,” since the arrival of social media around the year 2007, there has been, studies have shown, a 62% increase in suicide among young people ten to twenty-one years old and a dramatic upswing in cases of anxiety and depression within the same age group. This, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Again, correlation is not causation…but that’s a lot of correlation. 

This summer, in his first encyclical Magnifica humanitas (Magnificent humanity), Pope Leo XIV addressed, within the context of human dignity and the over-all social justice tradition of the Church, the implications for the human person of the wide-spread use of artificial intelligence (AI).

“We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities,” he writes, “provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love” (MH #126). There is a temptation, he further noted, for us to use AI as a way of absolving us from the responsibility of making difficult choices by leaving those judgments in the hands of computer programs. Gone would be the “human factor” behind making decisions that affect the lives and welfare of our fellow human beings. Computers can’t and won’t see the human face of those affected by decisions. They do not have within them compassion and love. Moreover, 

The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions—concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation—risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,” and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion. There are clearly harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy. Yet there is also a subtler danger, for when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers. (MH #102)

To add my own two-cents into the discussion in my role as a teacher, there is a danger in introducing AI too early into the academic lives of our kids. I have found that there are students who will attempt to have ChatGPT or Claude write papers for them by simply programming the prompt I have given them. While there are those who will see a certain “creativity” in our students when they do this by using the technology to solve a problem, what those people (and my students) fail to see is that in the very act of writing a paper, or interpreting a passage, or struggling to make sense of the material in front of them, they are developing the intellectual muscles that are necessary for problem-solving in real time and in situations where technology may be unavailable to them.

This is not to say that their asking AI to process information would be a bad thing in their futures. In fact, there will undoubtedly be times when calling on these programs would be the most prudent thing to do. But to allow, let alone encourage, high school and college students to do academic heavy-lifting primarily via AI would be like teaching a second-grader about addition by handing her a calculator. Of course, most of us pull out a calculator to do the arithmetic required for doing our taxes, but we do that having first mastered the concept of addition and multiplication and subtraction. We have developed those muscles.

In short, I think many of the ways we want to use AI will cause us to mentally atrophy. It would be like asking our wide receivers and sprinters to train by using Segways and E-bikes instead of doing the hard work of running and stretching and sweating to develop the skills so that they can become better athletes.

There is also the alarming trend of people turning to AI as a sort of pseudo-friend when they are in trouble, lonely, or bored. The generative chatbots of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have become places to which people reach out in times of difficulty. We’ve talked about this at school with our boys and among ourselves and reminding them and ourselves that we need human contact, not merely the illusion of it.

Aristotle described the human person as a “social animal.” We are made to be in relationships: with each other…and with God. Almost two centuries ago, as humanity underwent an earlier technological revolution, the Church was there to remind us of our dignity as human persons made in God’s image and likeness. In the first social encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), the last Pope Leo (XIII) reminded the world of the basic human rights enjoyed by all people—workers included—and they should never be seen as mere cogs in economic systems or the machines that run them. As our 19th century forebears were seduced by the promises of human perfectibility through technology, Leo XIII’s predecessor, Pius XI, boldly defined as dogma the Immaculate Conception of Mary. In proclaiming as an essential element of Christian faith that “the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin,” Pius reminded us—Bishop Fulton Sheen later observed—that human endeavors (including the use of technology) cannot perfect us on their own. We need God’s grace. The 19th century world ignored Pius’s warning, and catastrophes brought on in the 20th century by political systems that denied our need for God bear witness to what happens when we try to go it alone as a human race. As Pope Leo notes:

When we embrace the possibility of transcending ourselves through God’s grace, we do not deny our nature, nor do we become less human. On the contrary, as Pope Francis explained, “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.” (MH 128)

We would do well to heed Leo’s call to remember our graced humanity.

The Holy Father in his encyclical reminds us of the dignity of the human person, of the need that we have for each other, and that while technology can be good, that good is not intrinsic. Technology is always an instrumental good. The problem is that too many of us are conforming ourselves to the needs of our technology instead of having the technology make life better for us. Notes Leo: “while AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work” (MH 150). 

Technology serves humanity by helping us to overcome our weaknesses, to develop our strengths, to live in community, and to enable us to love better. It does not replace any of those things.

And yet we are allowing AI to do just that.

Years ago, and even today, Hollywood has played on our great fears that machines (or nowadays computers) would somehow “become human” and conspire to take over the world. Those concerns are, I think, a bit misplaced. A fear that we should have and where we need to be vigilant is not so much over the idea that computers will try to be human. It is that we will allow ourselves to become more like computers.

Robbing us of our magnificent humanity.
 

A.M.D.G./B.V.M.H.