COMMENTARY: The Catholic Church’s primary and most urgent task in confronting AI is doing everything we can to persuade those developing AI at breakneck speed that we are creatures of a Creator, not bipedal algorithms with data-processing capacities to be maximized.
During a Gaudium et Spes 22 podcast on the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas this past June, I said to my friend [and frequent Register contributor] Larry Chapp, perhaps more flippantly than the subject warranted, that the folks leading the AI revolution “don’t know the difference between metaphysics and Metamucil.” That is, they seem oblivious to the truth that there are deep truths inscribed into the human condition: truths that we can know by reason (and, Christians would insist, by revelation); truths that disclose the pathways to personal flourishing and social solidarity.
In her Oct. 3 Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan made a similar point, pungently:
Silicon Valley has been weird for at least two generations. Belief in strange or cultlike ideas (effective altruism, utilitarianism) has been as common as psychedelic use, strange health regimes, extreme capitalism, and a kind of personally high-functioning public optimism that carries with it a world of safe houses, gas masks, private air fleets,
