The Consolation of Limitation

Pope Leo released the first encyclical of his pontificate a couple of weeks ago. The dust has since settled in terms of initial response, but of course the questions he raised aren’t quite so settled.

The Pope addresses the topic of artificial intelligence in the document, and while folks have gone back and forth about its effectiveness, this recent First Things piece argues that “if attracting attention – and good, thoughtful attention – was the intention of Magnifica Humanitas’s presentation, it was successful.” The article notes that what was distinctive about the encyclical was not just its topic, but the way it was delivered: it wasn’t presented at a press conference, for instance, as is typical for encyclicals, but rather to an audience of “largely curial officials.” And, the audience included some non-curial and non-media officials. Chris Olah, for example, was there – cofounder of Anthropic, an AI giant of a company, and an atheist.

“It’s a risk to invite guests,” the First Things piece notes, but Olah followed the event up with his own address, and it has come across as “one of the most important from within the tech world on the moral and cultural, not merely economic, implications of AI.” Olah asks for leaders like Pope Leo to keep thinking about AI, with questions of ethics and moral implication, he says, being more properly the domain of the humanities, religion, and philosophy than of tech companies. Indeed tech companies, he goes on, are constantly jostling with “a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.” Among them are pressures to “stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier.” Also among them are “the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition.”

The bluntness of the point is useful. When it has come to developments in science, medicine, and technology, one perennial question that Christians and goodhearted people have thought to ask is this one: just because we can do something, does that mean we should? And here our pride threatens to run away with us. Yes, it tends to say, the more achievement, the better; the more power, the better; the more capacity and efficiency we can secure for ourselves, the better.

But it can be helpful here to recall something of the origins of modern science and technology. For its roots are mixed in with the history of something we tend to think of as contrary to science, something which works toward a very particular end – namely, magic. It’s noteworthy that some of the most prominent scientific minds of the seventeenth century – people like Isaac Newton or Robert Boyle – were as interested in magic, sorcery, and astrology as they were in what we now think of as natural science. And this was largely because a certain change in disposition toward the natural world was developing during that period. While for most of human history the natural world was thought to be part of an ordered cosmos, which human beings were called to work in harmony with amidst their cultural and technical developments, the start of the modern period brought with it a different attitude. The shift might be encapsulated in the view put forward by Francis Bacon: “Knowledge is power,” his mantra goes. Suddenly, the world was not regarded as a meaningful order, but as a kind of chaos, without intrinsic meaning, meant to be made subject to the human will. Human beings were not to find their place in a cosmic harmony, but to dominate it, to enslave nature, for the improvement of the human estate.

At the time of Bacon and Newton and Boyle, magic seemed a promising route toward such an end: its explicit purpose was to manipulate the forces of nature toward one’s own designs, and so intelligent minds began to dabble in it once again. Scientific methods ultimately won out as the more effective means of pursuing that end, but the aim of magic was nevertheless commandeered and reinforced, taking hold of the cultural imagination as the aim of science, as well. 

So why should this matter when it comes to AI? To return to Olah’s point: it’s just worth noting that the “older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition” have deep historical and cultural roots, too.  And the problem with this particular form of pride is that it tends to set us adrift into the realm of delusion. To pursue dominance over nature is to believe a lie about what we are – creatures who have the authority to exert their will over the created order. That’s actually just not who we are. But in the temptation to power that science has offered us, and that AI is now extending to us, we are at risk of buying into the illusion that we are greater, more self-sufficient, more autonomous beings than we truly are. That we’re free to do what we want if it will make us more powerful. That if we can do something, of course we should.

Here’s another way of putting it: AI can make us forget how badly we need to stay rooted in the real. There are stories already of the ways AI is landing strange, often frightening, roles in human life. Stories of people falling in love with their chatbots float around the internet; stories of people training chatbots to sound like deceased loved ones, so as to “make amends,” are cropping up as successful therapeutic techniques. But the kinds of consolations being offered amidst such stories are false ones – they are artificial. They’re the consolations of a race that has worked very hard to declare itself self-sufficient, all-powerful, and answerable to no one. And they’re the consolations of pride, a pride that thinks it can manufacture what it needs even amidst the mysteries of love and grief. And that’s a consolation that always deceives. 

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice,” the Pope’s encyclical opens, “either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” Should we desire something more than the comforts of self-sufficiency and power, we must embrace a different kind of consolation altogether: the consolation of humility. The consolation of limitation and dependence. The hard but sturdy consolation of truth. And the consolation of being responsible to – but also claimed and loved by – the real God who made us.