It was another big week for AI in the news, after weeks that saw sensational stories of AI “agents” going rogue and one senior figure – not the first – quitting the frontier AI development lab, Anthropic, warning of the new tech’s capacity to destroy humanity.
In the public discourse around the news, the responses have been somewhere on a spectrum running between “It’s too late, we’ve already lost,” and “It’s all a humbug, a cynical ploy to gin up more development capital.”
The president of the United States and a few other major figures excepted, everyone sees the need for regulation of AI development, but there is next to no agreement on anything other than that.
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Really, there is little in the way of agreement on what to regulate, precisely, or on how to regulate what “we” decide to regulate, when it comes to AI development.
Part of the problem there is that existing regulatory frameworks simply are not designed to help actual people manage systems with the information-gathering-and-organizing capacity of existing systems.
Meanwhile, the pace of AI development is so great – and getting faster – that it’s a safe bet new systems have come out of development since this scribbler began typing this sentence.
In his weekly General Audience this past Wednesday, the pope again warned against the impending technological eclipse of the human.
In a catechesis dedicated to the Vatican II Constitution, Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the modern world, Leo XIV noted how technological developments including AI “are opening up new possibilities, breaking down barriers and bridging distances.”
“On the other hand,” the pope said, “relationships are tending to become less and less personal, more virtual, and there is a risk of becoming accustomed to delegating to algorithms decisions that are the sole preserve of the human conscience.”
“Ensuring that social relationships have real substance and personal depth is, in this regard, the contribution that the Christian community seeks to offer.”
So, it wasn’t surprising when the Church’s top diplomat told reporters the Church is not likely to make concrete proposals during the UN General Assembly, which opened this month in New York and will see world leaders in town for the General Debate this week.
“The Holy See normally sets out and puts forward principles,” said the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin last week, “probably, we are not going to look for immediate technical solutions at this stage.”
Parolin was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event in the Italian parliament last week, on Faith and Reason in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
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The cardinal, whose remarks always merit close reading, subtly but unmistakably ceded the inevitability of AI.
“Today,” he said, “artificial intelligence is imposing itself.”
“[W]hen you open your computer and read something,” Parolin said, “it already gives you a summary.”
I thought of myself when I read that, to be perfectly frank, and thought of myself at a family gathering this summer, when a relative innocently asked me which AI app I use most and I answered, “None of them.”
“Well,” said a younger member of the family, “you just used your phone to look something up,” and indeed, I had just a few minutes before the exchange used my phone – if memory serves – to look up a precise distance between two places, though I can’t for the life of me recall what they were or why the precise distance mattered.
The thing that gave me pause was how I hadn’t noticed what had really happened.
I’d used AI without realizing it, and then I denied using AI in general, even though I’d just used it. So, further to Parolin’s observation, it was “just there” to me – a dinosaur who grew up in the age of paper maps and the road atlas – and will be just there to every generation that comes after, in a way paper maps and road atlases already aren’t.
Road trips are already a very different experience, and they’ll be more different in the years to come, when the vehicles drive themselves (and we’re all passengers, all plugged into our devices, doom-scrolling AI-curated content packaged just for each of us and played for our eyes and our ears, only).
There’s something apocalyptic in that vision, which is already more than dimply on the horizon, even if it isn’t exactly the grim vision of AI uprising or human eclipse by sentient machines.
Regarding the pope and the Vatican and the competing apocalyptic visions of AI revolution, the Holy See’s opposition to “killer robots” is long-standing and adamantine, as a matter of record.
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So, the cardinal secretary of state wasn’t expressing reluctance to propose regulation on that score.
Leo XIV has been clear – literally from Day One of his pontificate – about his sense of urgency regarding the need for a recovery of humanity’s humanity before we allow it to be eclipsed, and regarding the wisdom of the Church and her “expertise in humanity” to guide us.
“The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination,” Leo wrote in his encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas, before quoting his immediate predecessor: “Never has humanity had such power over itself.”
“New technologies open up a horizon extending in directions that are imaginable but not yet fully predictable,” Leo wrote. “This complicates the assessment of their potential impact and the long-term effects they may have on both the dignity of individuals and the common good,” he continued.
Then, he said regulation is necessary but not sufficient and should not be the primary focus of Christian engagement with the phenomenon, even if Christian voices must make themselves heard in conversations over how to regulate the new and emerging technologies.
“[C]rucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided,” the pontiff wrote in Magnifica humanitas: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”
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Suppose for a minute, that the collective “we” of humanity do get together, and that we are able to put effective guardrails in place before James Cameron’s Terminator or the Wachowskis’ Matrix become anachronistic documentary pictures.
Will we be in time to stave off Mike Judge’s apocalyptic vision in Idiocracy, or Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E (to use the favorite of Crux Now’s Editor-in-Chief, Charles Collins)?
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That is the question at the heart of the thinking Leo XIV is doing and calling Catholics to do together.
Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri