Pope Leo XIV wrote a deeply considered encyclical on AI called Magnifica Humanitas. It discusses all the major issues - the concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations developing this technology, the datafication and quantification of human existence, the exploitation of labor, resource intensive data centers and the hidden human supply chains that exist behind the production of this technology.
It discusses the corrosion of economic opportunity, about the need to counter the way that AI is spreading misinformation and the idea that AI is essentially threatening to turn the world into a new colonial world order. He calls out transhumanism and the belief that somehow AI is meant to perfect humans. The document says that humanity flourishes, not despite limitations, but often through them. It is precisely within our limitations that compassion, generosity, spiritual experience etc. find a place.
He warns that the problem is not that artificial intelligence will become too human-like, but that human beings will become like machines. The encyclical says that modern society is shaped by a technocratic paradigm, that prizes efficiency, control, optimization and power over human dignity, reducing people to functions. He sees that what's behind the rush toward the post-human path is the way that we view difficulties right now - weakness, dependence etc. are problems to be engineered away. The encyclical has many quotable observations some of which are:
- More power does not necessarily imply something better.
- A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.
- ... technical power, if left unbalanced, does not make us more capable; it makes us more isolated and more vulnerable to being dominated and excluded.
- For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.
Not surprisingly, the Pope's words have already been ridiculed and disdained by those in whose interest it is to put such questions to the side. United States Secretary of Interior in the US administration, Doug Burgum, said in a television interview that it is not part of the 'role of the Pope' for Leo to speak to what he did. But what Burgum represents in saying this is Washington's deference to Silicon Valley.
People keep telling us, life is not about the destination. Life is about the journey. But when we think about AI, we only think about the destination. We are amazed by its remarkable ability to write the book, paint the painting, solve the problem. But we forget the importance of doing the work oneself. A person is smarter, better at problem solving, more resourceful, not because a book exists with her ideas in it, but because she wrote it. It's the same for love, friendships, conflict. We forget that we give up certain skills or abilities because of technology.
The tech bros that we're told to trust, have in many instances shown themselves to be creepily cold to any aspect of humanity that is not quantifiable and consumable. Some of them have shown themselves to be in their own personal lives, eerily utopian, trying to find ways to immortality by uploading their brains to the cloud or rejuvenating themselves with blood transfusions from younger men. And some have shown themselves to be just as creepily dystopian, building elaborate bunkers for themselves and to be ready in case their mantra of move fast and break things creates a mess.
Take the example of Elon Musk. He thinks of human beings only in terms of hardware and software. Biological and digital systems had begun to merge, forming what he called “cybernetic collectives” of networked intelligence. The cybernetic collective, like any networked system, could be infected. So he had to take control of the interfaces where this fusion was taking place — from social media to neural implants to artificial intelligence — to ensure that the right kind of cyborgs were being made.
“Most humans have very limited firewalls,” he elaborated elsewhere, “so are easily programmed.” He called George Soros a “system hacker” who was funding a “fake asylum-seeker nightmare”. Once, he was warning us that AI has no empathy for the human species. Suddenly, he changed his mind about the importance of empathy. He recently said that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.
It increasingly appears to him that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence. He is now telling us that Homo sapiens will be remembered as nothing more than the primitive computer hardware on which some smart people like himself developed higher, smarter programs.
Many tech lords believe that humanity must fuse itself with AI and other technologies so that we become cyborgs that colonize the cosmos. They sound like overexcited children as they speak of their dream to distill the essence of what it means to be human, our cognition, our consciousness, our emotions, into data blocks to be downloaded as binary code onto some device. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, said that because flesh and blood doesn't travel well in space, we humans must become cyborgs if we are to meet our potential as conquerors of the universe, of the cosmos.
It would be a mistake to think that this is a harmless fantasy. They argue that anybody who tries to impede this metamorphosis of us into cyborgs is a villain that must be put down. Peter Thiel is a great example of this mindset. He sees anyone daring to impede his company's use of tech - political movements, government regulation, communities, maybe the Pope - as the handmaidens of the Antichrist. Marc Andreeson refers to charity as a waste of resources that big tech could be using profitably to help humans become cyborgs.
Silicon Valley points out things of which we should rightly be afraid, but then offers the alternative of saying we need to hand limitless power to the smart people who can innovate their way to the future. Vast economic inequality, potential mass unemployment, psychological degeneration , these are all just part of the price of progress if they happen, they say. The solution, Silicon Valley tells us, is to head even more quickly in the direction we're headed with even less thought to where we're going and who's taking us there.
