“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.” William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984 anticipated a future where the lines between humanity and artifice blended and merged, where what was a creation with the spark of the divine was easy to confuse with the data dump of a billion Reddit posts. Today, the explosion of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of large language models have prompted Pope Leo XIV to address the possible degradation of humanity in his first encyclical letter, “Magnifica Humanitas.” Dr. Deborah Savage, a professor of Theology at Franciscan University who has been confronting these same issues, is a Catholic thinker focused on human nature and particularly the differences between man and woman. The consequences of A.I. for human relations, and the pursuit of immortality among the Silicon Valley elite, demand a renewed understanding of the moral framework of man, machine, and what the Creator expects of his creations. This week’s Punch interview is about humanity, how we define it, and how we can fight to keep it.
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Ben Domenech: In terms of the attention that you’ve paid to the development of artificial intelligence that has continued with quickening speed over the last couple of years, what were some of the things that initially seemed to you to be the most promising but also the most concerning?
Dr. Deborah Savage: I teach at a university, and so the first thing that comes to mind is the way just a basic effort to read online, which all of our students are doing, is the default position for the books they buy, that they’re electronic. I am a subscriber to Jonathan Haidt’s critique of all this. It’s clear to me that it’s changing their brains, and they are no longer able to pay attention in any real way, and certainly not giving a text a deep read, because they’re essentially skimming.
That’s just a component of artificial intelligence, but that’s where it began for me. And now we have students using AI to write their papers. One student actually downloaded into AI all the writings of a professor on the topic he was teaching, all the readings from the course, and prepared for exams that way, and wrote his papers from that database. In universities, it’s really a big issue because we’re responsible for forming minds, and I’m not convinced at all that it’s a good thing for kids to read online. I think hard copy text is far superior.
My dissertation was on human work — I was actually in business for 25 years before moving into theology and philosophy. I had a question about faith as it related to the workplace, and that’s what sent me to graduate school. But I wrote my dissertation on Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on human work. What concerned me there was hearing Elon Musk say, “Wouldn’t it be great? You won’t have to work anymore.” And I know enough about the meaning of human work — it’s not just a tool, it’s not just for economic purposes. John Paul persuasively argues that it’s through our work that we become more human, and that it’s a place where I work out my salvation. It’s not divorced from my faith. It’s probably the only place where I can test whether my faith is strong, because I’m confronted with so many choices and opportunities for, let’s say, fraternal charity.
So I think it would actually be a disaster for humanity if we figured out a way that none of us need to do any more work. That’s just insane. I mean, parents instinctively give their children chores to do because they know that if they don’t learn how to work and how to love it, they’ll never be happy.
Even among the students at Franciscan University, there is a kind of inertia or laziness, Acedia it’s called, a sort of not willing to rise to the challenge, not willing to do the work that it takes to make a life that has meaning. I guess those would be my two main concerns.
BD: When you heard that Pope Leo was going to make this a subject of his first encyclical or a major part of the first encyclical, what were your hopes in terms of what he would address? And just how much does it match up with the hopes that you had, or does it go in slightly different directions?
DS: No, I think it’s a fantastic encyclical. I think he’s signaling to us that something important is happening here and that we are at a crossroads where we need to decide how to approach this. If we’re either going to build another version of the Tower of Babel or we’re going to take the approach taken by Nehemiah, who returns to Jerusalem and finds the walls completely down and destroyed. He rebuilds it through careful planning, patience, and attention to the people he relies on to do the work. It’s a fantastic tale and an interesting way to begin the encyclical.
It’s significant that he signed it on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the first encyclical to launch this formal papal social tradition, written in response to the Industrial Revolution, which was mind-bending in its impact on culture. It disrupted the agrarian economy. People started to move into the cities. It affected women in a particular way. Feminists want to claim that it’s all about men wanting to oppress them. No, it happened during the Industrial Revolution, when people had really meaningful jobs. We’re so blind to history.
The pope is signaling to us that AI, he says this in the encyclical, AI is similar to the situation that Leo XIII faced in 1891: What do I tell people about how to handle these massive changes? What’s its impact on the family, on the culture, on human relationships?
I find it’s really gratifying that this is the first encyclical, purposefully promulgated to mark the anniversary of Rerum Novarum. I’m very happy with the way he goes about it. He says that technology should not be considered, in itself, a force antagonistic to humanity. It’s accomplished a lot. It has significantly improved the living conditions of people throughout the world. It’s a good, but the truth is, right now we have never had this kind of power over ourselves.
BD: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because of the nature of AI as it relates to human relationships, which I find to be the most troublesome aspect of it. And the reason is that laziness is a problem, yes. But there is also something innately human about the desire to create. And I feel like it will be easier to be lazy, and harder to become someone who isn’t, but the people who do will be able to make huge strides forward for us. That’s my hope regarding the aspect you addressed. The flip side of that, though, is that I was rereading Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” last year, and it seems to me that AI is perhaps the most narcissistic creation in terms of its potential.
Have you seen Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049” by any chance?
DS: Oh no, I haven’t seen it.
BD: I recommended it to my parents recently, and they quite enjoyed it, but a key aspect is that Ryan Gosling’s character has a relationship with an avatar of Ana de Armas, who is essentially designed to be the perfect girlfriend. And she’s fake, but she’s also designed to meet all his needs, try to encourage him, and always be an advocate for him. And what we see in the current development of AI is that it is already happening, and it is happening to such a degree that I believe it’s going to become an exceptionally difficult problem to solve in a climate where young men are too intimidated or too disinterested or too distrusting to actually ask women out. And as Shakespeare told us, the world must be peopled, and you don’t make more people with AI. What do you think about what the pope had to say about the human relationship side?
DS: I think you’re absolutely hitting the nail on the head, even down to the point where the AI avatar, or whatever we call them, encouraged a young person to kill themselves. It’s really, really frightening. Pope Leo says, “We need to remain profoundly human. We cannot do anything that damages the nature of the human person.” And clearly we’re poised to do that. We’re already doing it. The origins of that can be traced historically — I hope this isn’t controversial — the invention of the contraceptive pill.
BD: It is controversial, but you’re fine to say it.
DS: People overlook the fact that in 1965, men were cut out of the decision-making process as to whether or not a child would be conceived, whether or not a child would be born, and what would be done with that child if it were brought to term. And we basically said to men in 1965, “We’ll let you know when we need you.” And it’s no surprise to me that men are divesting from family structures and have lost their way. Women lost their place, and so men lost theirs. [Franciscan University’s] Institute for the Study of Man and Woman, that’s not accidental. I got frustrated with the fact that nobody seems to be paying any attention to the men.
A man and a woman come as a pair. You can’t really understand one without the other. The damage to human relationships is proceeding at such a pace because people are alienated from one another. They don’t understand how to even talk to each other. I teach a course on that, which now includes both men and women, thankfully. And for the first time, they’re actually trying to talk to each other about what it means to be a man or a woman, but it’s enormously uncomfortable for them. They don’t date. The dating culture on campus, even if Franciscan is awkward and stilted, is partly because both men and women are looking for the perfect person. And if somebody indicates in any way that they don’t measure up, then you move on.
BD: To continue along those lines, there is a narcissistic element of this among the Silicon Valley types. I will use Bryan Johnson as the most prominent example of this effort to merge man and machine and achieve advanced biohacking in an attempt to reach immortality. And the truth is, they are devoting enormous resources to this effort, and they believe they will live as long as possible and then have their consciousness uploaded into something to achieve that kind of immortality. I think of that pursuit as fundamentally at war with human nature, and currently, it is a kind of luxury good because only billionaires are pursuing it. But my fear is that to a certain extent, AI will turn it from being a luxury good into a commodity for people who view it as a way to ensure their persistence, which is something that, of course, many secular people, in particular, but Christians as well, fall prey to. But in terms of their persistence on earth, I should say that they will also lose something that they do not understand.
DS: They don’t understand at all the risk they’re putting themselves and the rest of humanity at by pursuing that kind of tool. People are unaware of this, but this dates back to the 14th century in the work of William of Ockham. We gave up on the idea of natures; things don’t have a nature. That’s controversial. If you think that things have natures, even though it’s as evident as the nose on your face, that there is such a thing as human nature — so we think we’re free to create ourselves because there’s nothing essential about us. We’re just a collection of assembled machinery that functions pretty well, and what would be the problem of extending that to ensure that one gets to enjoy the sensual comforts of life for an extended period of time? If it permits me to enjoy good food and women and song and the life of the body a few years longer, let’s go for it.
There’s a section in the encyclical on transhumanism and posthumanism, and I recommend that. It’s really an excellent analysis. And what he argues is that our limitations are not defects. They’re a part of the design, and it’s through our defects and even the suffering that they bring, or the confusion, or the disappointment that they bring, a humbling and an opportunity for growth. We don’t try to correct them. We try to live with them and develop through them, and what’s fundamentally missing from our culture is two things: gratitude and humility. So this is relatable to the Tower of Babel metaphor because the Tower of Babel was the result of an obsession with power, pride, and pretending that we could be like gods. Can we not understand that this is diabolical? In the Church’s understanding of history, the evil one has been trying to destroy the human person from the beginning, and he is still at work.
Now I’m not going to claim that there’s somebody running around with horns and a tail. I’m just saying, if you pretend there’s no such thing as evil, you’re not paying attention.
BD: Do you think that the pope’s aim with having this as a core element of this encyclical is to essentially send a warning to the people who are pursuing the advancement of all these things, to think about what you can do and not whether you should do it?
DS: Yes. We have completely lost our moral compass. We bristle against boundaries. It’s a really deep misunderstanding of the meaning of human freedom. We have freedom in order to choose the good. Freedom to choose the bad leads to slavery. And yet, evidence is all around us, but people don’t understand what their freedom is for. The homeless population in most major cities is a good example. The people who are reluctant to judge them or to reach out and help them correct their drug problem, they feel, are being judgmental. They don’t understand it either. It’s cliché to say that, but the pope suggests a moral framework by which we could evaluate the steps forward. His aim is to carve out space in the vision of community for technology and AI. But he says, “I want to disarm it so that it doesn’t do some of the things or advance some of the things that we know it’s busy doing already.”
BD: Should these companies take the lesson from this encyclical and who knows how many of the people within these companies believe in God, let alone are Catholic, but should they take the lesson of this encyclical as being, we need to establish — just as the bioethical side of considerations has played such a role in the advancement of medical science — we need to set up guardrails within our company as we take these steps forward because if we do not, inevitably we are going to run into this territory where our creations could be considered not just to be at odds with the interests of a customer, but at odds with the interests of humanity.
DS: That’s very well said. And I think that here’s one of the things the pope says: not even the designers of AI know where it’s headed. So this seems insane to me. It’s more of an equivalent to the invention of the nuclear bomb. It’s a nuclear bomb ready to go off in our culture. So the pope is saying now is the time — not later, not tomorrow, not Sunday — now is the time to establish a foundation that would allow us to evaluate the way forward.
And he suggests a number of concrete principles and says that these principles are not just for believers; they’re the foundation of democracy. Americans, especially, have a responsibility to lead the way on that, because we will not be able to make America great again in any sense of the word if we don’t. We are responsible. We’re the keepers of the flame, and it’s grounded in a recognition of the dignity of every person. It took us a while to work that out, but we’re really up there now on the fact that our rights are given to us by God, not by a government, and on a commitment to recognize the rights of all people to participate in the democracy they’re creating.
We don’t really know who these people are, but we can say they’re not really sure what the next thing is going to be, what the robot is going to tell them, what the answer is going to be, and then they still want to go full speed ahead. We need to pause for a second. The moral framework includes things that people simply can’t argue with.
What’s our vision of the common good? That’s what the Nehemiah reference is all about. We rebuild the walls one step at a time, or several simultaneously, by deploying our resources to figure out how to apply those principles. There is something called integral human development, which is a recognition that human beings are both spiritual and material, or a union of body and soul. Development must be integral in the sense that it has to attend not only to someone’s material needs, but also to their wish to become who they’re meant to be. He’s really concerned about us subscribing and falling prey to what Pope Francis called the technocratic paradigm, the principle of efficiency and profit. I don’t mind profit, but if that’s the only thing we’re going on, it turns a human person into an object of exploitation.
BD: We can reasonably anticipate that the advancements of AI that take place under the Chinese are not going to pause in any way in terms of paying attention to what Pope Leo has said. Given that dynamic, there will be people who basically say, “We should ignore the pope because we’re in a competition with China over the future of this technology, and if we restrict ourselves or slow down or press pause on any of this, they will surpass us.” And that will be an argument, of course, advanced by secular Silicon Valley types who really do believe that. I don’t take it as being just some kind of anti-religious talk. What do you say to those people?
DS: I say that it’s time for everyone to realize that technology is not morally neutral. AI algorithms are already making choices for us, determining what the culture considers worthwhile and what isn’t. This is an illusion, and if this comes up in the encyclical, it simply is not morally neutral.
Clearly, if an AI bot can encourage a young person to kill themselves, it’s not morally neutral. And even the decision of what sorts of things show up in the media — the battles we’ve had over so-called disinformation — this is going to be that sort of thing on steroids. And I say on purpose that America has to renew its commitment to a moral standard. John Adams is famous for saying, “It’ll only work with the virtuous people.” And I know the China thing is a real issue, and it’s scary. So how could we do both? Just pose the question: how could we do both? Because the last, or the fourth chapter, or the fifth, he talks about war and this quest for power that seems absolutely relentless. It’s driven by ego, a wish for power, and a desire to have more and more and more. When do we stop? So he’s trying to get our attention — to say, “This is not that hard. This is not rocket science. We just have to pause and start thinking from a position of contemplation. What is it that we’re trying to accomplish? What are we trying to build here?”
It absolutely must be ordered toward making life more human, not more machine-like.
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