Last fall, the Notre Dame philosopher, Meghan Sullivan, participated in a closed-door meeting at the Vatican. She was there to discuss AI ethics with a group of religious thinkers, academics, and leading members of the technology industry.
As Sullivan recalls in a recent newsletter, she attended an optional Catholic Mass the first morning, held in an ancient church. She was surprised to see one of the tech leaders sitting a few rows away in the pews. “[This was] the kind of guy you typically see in a black t-shirt and chinos,” she writes. “That morning he was dressed in a brown suit and tie, quietly taking in the sanctuary as the first rays of morning light filled the room.”
After the service concluded, they chatted. The tech leader, it turned out, was not Catholic. When Sullivan asked him why he was here, he gave the following answer:
“We’re building something that is going to change life as we know it. I want to make sure I keep in touch with what humans have always cared about. This is a place that takes care of those values.”
I found this interaction chilling. Not because of what it says about potential AI disruptions, but because of what it tells us about the engineers developing this technology.
The AI industry is suffused with a religious fervor. As Elizabeth Lopatto recently pointed out, they’ve stopped trying to build useful products and are focusing instead on “inventing the future.” This puts these companies in the dual role of priest and prophet, frantically trying to appease the digital deity they imagine they’ve summoned, all the while warning the masses of its impending holy wrath.
I understand this attraction. This all must be terribly exciting and life-affirming for that executive in his brown suit. He gets to be Aaron and Amos all at once.
But not everyone is willing to go along with this game…
Last week, Pope Leo XIV released a 42,000-word encyclical, ”Magnifica Humanitas,” in response to the challenges of artificial intelligence. I’m still digesting the full document, but early summaries indicate that the Pope is not ready to meekly acquiesce to the AI future that we’ve been told is inevitable.
Consider the following key exhortation from the encyclical:
“With the heart of a shepherd and a father, I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty, and the world once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.”
Tools should be useful. Tools should help people’s lives and build up the “common good.” Tools are what technology companies should seek to create.
When AI leaders resignedly shake their heads, and talk about the need for the government to provide guaranteed income once their AI models automate all work, or eagerly describe a future in which we live happily alongside “machines of loving grace,” this is not forward-looking pragmatism; it’s hubris. A new Tower of Babel built out of GPUs.
Thankfully, in recent weeks, there has been a marked shift in how technology executives talk about AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called BS on executives claiming they’re laying people off due to AI, calling the excuse “lazy” and “just a way for them to sound smart.” Perhaps even more surprising, just last week, Sam Altman admitted he had been “pretty wrong” about his previous predictions that AI would automate large numbers of jobs.
These shifts in tone are likely more about PR damage control than a legitimate change of heart. But it’s still good to see. Leave the religion to the Pope; I want my technology executives focused on building things people actually want.
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As An Aside
I think it’s telling that one of the articles I read summarizing the Pope’s new encyclical casually and confidently made the following points:
- “A.I. has already displaced many entry-level jobs.”
- “Mass automation of both white collar work and blue collar work is likely to significantly reshape most sectors of the labor market.”
This is pretty shocking, as neither of these claims is widely accepted. And now, as mentioned, many leading AI CEOs have come out to push back on these specific talking points.
I’m not sure that tech leaders realize just how much anxiety and fear they spread during the period in which they were cosplaying as solemn x-risk sages. This is a p(doom) genie that might take a while to put back in its bottle.
