AI anthropology
09 - 06/26 /12:49
Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, is about artificial intelligence and arrives at a moment of genuine civilizational anxiety. AI promises gains in productivity and scientific discovery. But it also raises fears about economic displacement, surveillance, social manipulation and concentration of power in the hands of technological elites.
Edited article by Rev Robert Sirico, Catholic priest, Acton Institute president emeritus.
Often the debate about AI presents two extremes. Technological pessimists speak as if modernity itself were a mistake. Technocrats and transhumanists greet every computational advance as a step toward transcendence. One side would smash the machines; the other would surrender to them.
Edited article by Rev Robert Sirico, Catholic priest, Acton Institute president emeritus.
Often the debate about AI presents two extremes. Technological pessimists speak as if modernity itself were a mistake. Technocrats and transhumanists greet every computational advance as a step toward transcendence. One side would smash the machines; the other would surrender to them.
The issue is not whether technological progress should continue. There is a deeper question: Progress for whom? Examining that puzzle reveals that the real subject of debate isn’t AI. The real debate is about anthropology.
Every technological system presupposes some notion of what human beings are. If we are biological machines—producers, consumers or data points—then superior computational systems threaten to eclipse humanity. But if we possess an intrinsic dignity that transcends utility, efficiency and economic value, if we are distinct from machines, then technology can remain servant rather than master.
Magnifica Humanitas warns repeatedly against both economism and scientism: the temptation to reduce human beings to market functions or material processes. Society loses sight of human reality “when the economy turns against the person or science oversteps the limits of its competence.”
Increasingly, modern societies evaluate people according to measurable output. AI could accelerate this dramatically. Decisions made with human judgment are delegated to algorithms. Labor becomes more interchangeable. Instead of flourishing, people become abstractions within systems optimized for performance.
Pope Leo’s response is not anti-technology. The encyclical praises entrepreneurial initiative as a worthy vocation and recognizes the enormous potential of innovation to alleviate suffering and expand opportunity. Nor does he reject markets and private property. The document reaffirms the Catholic tradition’s defense of private ownership while emphasizing its social responsibilities.
The concern is power.
AI, digital platforms, and algorithmic systems increasingly place control over communication, finance, labor and culture in the hands of a few. This concentration of power risks creating new forms of dependency and social control incompatible with human nature and freedom.
Some contemporary responses to technological concentration may worsen the problem they seek to solve. There is growing pressure to rely upon the state as the primary regulator of the AI revolution. However, a centralized administrative approach may simply relocate concentrated power from private elites to managerial bureaucracies, operating at even greater distance from ordinary communities and persons.
Pope Leo’s corrective is his emphasis on subsidiarity. This principle holds that higher authorities should support rather than supplant the responsibilities of families, communities and intermediary associations.
He explicitly warns against “paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life” and insists that decisions should be made “at the closest level possible to the persons involved.”
This has enormous implications for technology. The future of artificial intelligence can’t safely be entrusted either to giant corporations or giant states. A humane technological order requires a robust civil society: universities, localities, entrepreneurs, churches, professional associations and especially families capable of exercising moral responsibility and cultivating virtue. Regulation matters, but it doesn’t build civilization.
Does our society still have a coherent understanding of the human person capable of directing technological power toward genuinely human ends? The danger posed by artificial intelligence isn’t only economic disruption or surveillance. The deepest danger is that we come to see ourselves as machines and therefore accept being governed as machines.
The Christian tradition insists that human beings aren’t raw material for systems optimization or infinitely malleable units within a technological network. No machine has free will, conscience, spiritual depth, the capacity for love, or the ability to grow through hardship, sacrifice and contemplation.
Humanity itself can not be transcended. Human beings are ourselves transcendent. Humanity is not in some obsolete stage awaiting replacement by more efficient intelligence. Man isn’t surpassed by the machine, because man isn’t reducible to calculation or mechanical processes.