A Pivotal Choice

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“I asked AI for a prayer before dinner. It thanked the cloud.”

“The church livestream added AI captions. “Prince of Peace” became “prints of peas.”

These are jokes ChatGPT tells on itself. Not very funny, really, and evidently, telling jokes on itself – which is now a mindless, mechanical function of artificial intelligence – may not be in the cards for the AI of the future. It knows nothing about humility.

In a 2023 interview on 60 Minutes, Geoffrey Hinton – a British Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, regarded as one of the “godfathers of artificial intelligence” – said he believes AI systems are “intelligent,” and “can understand.”

More Intelligent Than Us?

They currently have no self-awareness, he believes, but will have, and thinks a time is coming when “machines will be more intelligent than us.” He agrees with interviewer Scott Pelley that “we will be the second most intelligent beings on the earth.” But I still doubt they will be willing to tell jokes on themselves.

So, what does this have to do with the search for God? Plenty, according to Pope Leo IX, who recently issued an encyclical entitled, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), about artificial intelligence.

Wait. Isn’t a pope a religious leader? Shouldn’t he be limiting himself to matters of faith and theology? He recently clashed with political leaders on subjects like war and migration and was criticized on just this point – that he shouldn’t insert himself into subjects that “don’t concern him.”

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A little background. Leo IX took his name from a predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 wrote what has become among the most famous of encyclicals, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things). It was written during the Industrial Revolution when a big global issue was the just treatment of workers. That Pope Leo viewed it as a matter of faith that workers were human beings with rights that shouldn’t be violated in the interest of making money. Wasn’t that a matter of faith and theology? Shouldn’t that have concerned Pope Leo XIII?

The job of popes – and bishops, priests, ministers, rabbis and teachers – is to apply the teachings of the Bible and their religious institutions to modern life and point out areas that are threats to the well-being of human beings, who derive their dignity from being “made in the image and likeness of God.” Sometimes those teachings converge with political or social issues and that’s where the rub is, the areas where people who disagree begin to criticize religious leaders and tell them to “mind their own business.”

So, what does Pope Leo IX have to say about AI? First, that technology, including AI, in itself is not antagonistic to humans.

New Tower of Babel?

However, “humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice,” he says in the introduction: “either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible.

“Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world. Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” 

The pope’s central argument is that technology should remain a tool for human flourishing rather than becoming a system that dominates people or reduces them to data. He repeatedly warns against a culture where efficiency, profit, and automation become more important than human dignity, relationships, moral responsibility, compassion and the life of the spirit. The real question, he insists, is whether AI will help people remain fully human.