[Catholic Caucus] Old and New: The American Pope Takes on AI

Pope Leo XIV surprised the cardinals with the choice of his papal name and then did the same when he announced his intention to focus on the AI Revolution. When he addressed the College of Cardinals the day after his election, he explained these choices:

“Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII, in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

Coming from America, the land of Silicon Valley and the tech revolution that has flowed from it, it seems fitting that Leo has taken on a burning issue of our day. Much of the pre-conclave speculation focused on the ecclesial divisions of the past century. Leo, who repeatedly has emphasized unity, including at his inaugural Mass, has immediately transcended this divide by pointing to the Church’s task of addressing the pressing issues of the day. It’s not a matter of simple politics or attempts to remain relevant to a secular world, because digital technology has already fundamentally impacted the daily lives of Christians. And many challenges await us as AI and genetic modifications promise to impact human life in previously unimaginable ways.

Pope Leo XIII awoke the Church from its slumber to address a fundamental shift occurring during the Industrial Revolution, using timeless truths from the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas to address new problems. Building on this legacy, Leo XIV...

“Pope Leo XIII, who lived in an age of momentous and disruptive change, sought to promote peace by encouraging social dialogue between capital and labor, technology and human intelligence, and different political cultures and nations. In the context of the ongoing digital revolution, we must rediscover, emphasize and cultivate our duty to train others in critical thinking, countering temptations to the contrary, which can also be found in ecclesial circles.” (Pope Leo IV)

The lack of interest in this is very telling. It looks like too many have already sold their souls to the new Religion of Technology.

“How Big Tech became the world’s most powerful ‘religion’ and why we need to become agnostic”

A chaplain at Harvard and MIT says tech has achieved a religiosity that threatens to make us the servant worshipers of a dangerous Big Tech agenda.

Tech has changed roles. It used to be a mere tool that people could use for bettering and strengthening humanity. Now, it has achieved a religiosity that threatens to make us the servant worshipers of a dangerous Big Tech agenda. We need to stop genuflecting to our black mirrors a hundred times a day and pull all that is digital down from the heavens, back into the toolbox.

Big Tech has become a basic feature of daily life, and it has come to be dominated by some extremely weird ideas. Many of those ideas are weirdly theological. Like Way of the Future (WOTF), a religion founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google and Uber AI engineer who made hundreds of millions before being convicted for IP theft against Google, avoiding jail when Donald Trump pardoned him. Levandowski, upon filing paperwork to found a new church, told the IRS that his new faith focused on, “The realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence, developed through computer hardware and software.” He believes humans are creating something that will soon be a god that, like the jealous one in the Bible, will be angry to discover that we didn’t start worshiping it sooner.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91254073/how-big-tech-became-the-worlds-most-powerful-religion-and-why-we-need-to-become-agnostic

The lack of interest in this is very telling. It looks like too many have already sold their souls to the new Religion of Technology.

I agree. In fact, the thing that motivated me to post this was reading some earlier articles posted here and the cavalier or dismissive attitudes people took toward possible dangers of AI. One doesn't have to be a Luddite to recognize the dehumanizing effects that technology has and can have on society.

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