Thoughts on the Pope's reflections on AI
At roughly 42,300 words, the document apparently is essentially a warning of the risks and ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. I haven’t read it – I’m not Catholic, and have no particular allegiance to the Pope, and 42,300 words from him is daunting - but judging from the stories and synopsis I have read, that seems to be the main takeaway.
At first glance, talking about artificial intelligence may not seem to be exactly in the Pope – or the Church’s - wheelhouse. But I read an article recently by a lady named Avital Balwit, who is chief of staff to the CEO of Anthropic. This was published in The Free Press (thefp.com), an online site I frequent. In her article, she said there is an expression that AI (artificial intelligence) developers in California use in referring to their work: “Building God.” Balwit said the phrase is not completely serious. She writes that it “sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. To try to decode: The speaker is gesturing at how powerful this technology could become—even, eventually, functionally omniscient or omnipotent.”
So maybe the Pope should comment on the idea of “building god,” even if the phrase is not entirely serious.
It’s interesting in that this Pope took his name from Pope Leo XII, who served from 1878 to 1903, during the last half of the Industrial Revolution. World economies were going through radical changes, moving from farm to city, from handmade to machines, which led to mass migration to urban areas, and creating incredible amounts of wealth for a relative few industrialists, not to mention some radical political philosophies. Leo XII issued his own encyclical, known in English as Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. In it, like the current Leo, he addresses the fears and concerns of new technology.
Essentially, what I gather the current Pope wrote is that there is no turning back the clock on AI, but that we need to learn to use it appropriately – morally – and not let it rob us of our basic humanity.
Since he is the head of the Catholic church, it’s appropriate that he used two Biblical stories to teach from: the Tower of Babel (Genesis) and the Building of the Wall of Jerusalem (Nehemiah).
If you know the story of Babel, humans – who to this point all spoke a common language – decided to build a tower that “reaches to the heavens.” Their building was, for the time, revolutionary; the Bible says, “They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.” This tower was apparently real. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (484 – 425 BC) said the tower of Babel still stood in his day and he had seen it.
It’s not likely that they expected this tower to actually reach heaven, or else they’d have built it on a mountain, reducing the distance. Maybe they thought they could build a tower from which they could see heaven and observe what was going on, or see the whole earth.
But if you go back to the end of the story of the Flood, you see God commanded people to “increase in number and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Instead, they gathered together on a plain to build a great city, including this tower, in what would eventually become Babylon, near modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about 60 miles south of Baghdad (according to a quick Google search).
That seems to be an important part of the story, that this tower represented rebellion against God’s command to “fill the earth.”
Pope Leo compares this story of building with another construction story, that of the wall of Jerusalem. The children of Israel had been captured, years later, by the Babylonians and scattered throughout that empire. Sometime later, a group returned under the leadership of Nehemiah, and started rebuilding the wall to protect Jerusalem. While Babel is a tale of pride leading to ruin, the wall is a story of protection, of fulfilling God’s promise.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on so long about these two stories. But I think Pope Leo IV makes an interesting point.
If I remember my college class on computer programming correctly (this was the age of computer cards, or punch cards, that programmed early computers), this technology runs on language. In those days, the language was Fortran and COBOL and ALGOL. I was a journalism major, so don’t hold me to anything technical or mathematical.
Today, it seems our computers can communicate with each other across various programming languages fairly easily. We seem to have eliminated the problems of systems running on different languages that we had back in the 1970s.
The internet now has an incredible ability for humans to communicate with each other, to be in contact across oceans and continents, to send and receive messages and pictures and homemade movies with incredible speed and simplicity (if even I can do it).
It’s supposed to connect us. And certainly it does, to some extent.
It’s also entertaining us, which becomes a problem. Engineers work hard to keep us from being bored. Fly on an airplane, sit in a waiting room – shoot, observe a family riding in a car – and while you see people sitting next to each other, side-by-side, maybe even shoulders touching, they are more likely to be studying their phones that interacting with each other. They don’t talk. They don’t even sit and contemplate the world going by outside the window. They are entertained.
I know. I do it too.
Not everyone who used to sit side-by-side on airplanes or in waiting rooms or even on long car rides communicate with each other. Often these were done in silence.
But we’ve done away with silence, too. It’s as if we’re afraid of silence, of not having “anything to do.” We’re afraid of just having to think, to let our minds go wherever our minds might go, devoid of outside stimuli.
This isn’t new. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” Almost two centuries before Lewis, theologian/philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence!” 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in Pensées, said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Silence is uncomfortable. As a recovering journalist, I learned that if I let the person I was interviewing finish an answer and then I didn’t say anything for a minute or so, the person would often then blurt out something imminently quotable, maybe even more truthful, because by and large humans can’t abide silence.
But we need silence. In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon says there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak.” Research shows that even brief periods of silence can have measurable health benefits. A 2006 study published on Healthline found that a 2‑minute silence after music led to greater reductions in heart rate and blood pressure than listening to slow, relaxing music alone. According to elissagoodman.com, “Silence helps lower cortisol and adrenaline, shifting the body from “fight-or-flight” into a “rest and digest” state.” The Cleveland Clinic reported that “Calm, quiet moments can steady breathing and reduce muscle tension.” These studies are everywhere.
I grew up in a faith that stressed having a ‘’quiet time,” a time away from the distractions of life to be quiet and contemplate God. Jesus did it, frequently moving away from people – even from his disciples - who followed him. “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray’” (Matthew 26:36). “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).
But even in prayer, too often I can’t bear silence. I tend to start out talking to God, asking for things, petitioning for people, explaining what happened (Lewis writes, “the trouble is that what we call ‘asking God’s forgiveness’ very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses”) – as if God needs a daily briefing on my world and what I have done.
These days, I am trying to enter prayer by saying less. God already knows my heart. He knows what is going on. Oh, I still talk, but I want to spend a few moments being quiet, and maybe – just maybe – I’ll hear Him speak to me, reveal Himself to me.
Again, C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory admits he often approached his quiet time with a sense of timidity. As one writer put it, Lewis did so “not because he feared he wouldn’t meet God, but because he knew he would. If he wasn’t careful, God might maneuver past Lewis’s rote prayers. Then, in the silence, God might tell him to do something he’d rather not do, such as skip his extra morning cigarette, or, worse, tear up the sharply worded letter he was about to send to someone who’d been rude to him.” (How modern are Lewis’ warnings!)
Indeed, silence can change us.
But let me bring this back full circle, to the Pope and AI. Lest you think I am really smart, know I used some form of AI for this writing. I don’t know all these scripture references by heart, or all the quotes that I use. But I can simply put a phrase or idea into what I know as the “search engine,” and my research is often done for me. AI is indeed a tool we can put to use for good purpose.
The problem is if we use AI - the internet - to distract us from real life, or if we use AI or AI simulations to substitute for real flesh-and-blood relationships, it just might make us less human. But if we use new technology as a tool, it can give us more free time to actually develop real relationships, strengthen the ones we have, read and study more.
It might even make us more human.
It might even bring us closer to God.
