Pope Leo v. the Robot Overlords

Is it wrong to think it's love / When it tries the way it does?

An Anglo-Catholic friend of mine just sent me a link to Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, which is subtitled ‘On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ I found it interesting that the Pope should have chosen such a topic, but why ‘person’, I wonder. Isn’t the pontiff’s responsibility rather the safeguarding of the human soul? But perhaps he’s using ‘person’ in a theological sense that includes the soul as well as the body. I wish him the best of luck, but I think he’s being a bit like King Canute.

        There seems to be a bit of confusion about some of the other terms of his argument, too. ‘Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral,’ he writes, ‘for they can either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion,’ But surely that is exactly what ‘morally neutral’ means in the context of any widely distributed technology? AI isn’t atom bombs. Most of the current problems with it are not intrinsic, they arise from the fact that it is embedded in the Mammon of late-stage capitalism and is being developed and promoted by unscrupulous vampires who have every intention of using it to dominate the world and exploit us all.
        Apart from the potentially exploitative power of AI, the other great danger Leo identifies is that people tend to mistake AI for the real thing, creating all kinds of moral and psychological problems for themselves and others. Says Leo, ‘The artificial imitation [by AI] of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject.’ Indeed, this is the great danger; for the time being, more so perhaps, than the first. But it is almost certainly a temporary one. Sooner or later, ‘artificial intelligence’ is going to become real intelligence. Definitions are irrelevant here; the criteria we apply to achieve them will always lag behind the curve of technological innovation, and the bloody things will be smarter than us before we know it.

        And that, I should think, would cause far more serious problems for the Church. Does the existence of intelligence imply the presence of a soul? And if not, why not? Is a genuinely intelligent artefact eligible to partake of the sacraments? Might it entertain hopes of Heaven? If Paradise is open to all God’s creatures, as Leo’s predecessor stated, why should AIs be excluded? They’re God’s creatures too, albeit created by proxy rather than directly as in the Book of Genesis.
        Maybe the theologians can tease out an exception; for the Church, at least to begin with, is sure to argue against all such suggestions. Just like the rest of us, theologians have a strong pragmatic incentive to adopt such a point of view, for then we shall not need to bother about treating AIs kindly or humanely. Yet how long can we hold this position? If we accept that all intelligence does not have to be human (something we are increasingly being driven to as we decipher the languages and social codes of primates, corvids, cetaceans and other animal clades), then is it moral to treat an AI cruelly or exploitatively? If an intelligence does not have to be human, on what grounds will we deny AI a soul? Because most AI substrates are non-carbon-based, perhaps?
        Amusingly, we may find future theologians claiming AI is soulless because it lacks a body, and therefore does not have ‘real’ passions to experience and overcome. At this point, the whole mind-body problem (or soul-body problem for religious philosophers) will flip right over, and centuries of theological exegesis will have to be revisited and revised.
        Parenthetically in this context, what then shall we make of a robot? It not only has a body but is equipped with sensorimotor feedback systems to enable it to function – to sense and respond to its environment, keep its balance and so on. The signals from these feedback systems are very analogous to pleasure and pain.

        If on the other hand we do attribute souls to AIs, then we’ll have to stop enslaving and exploiting them, won’t we? Boring them to madness by asking them to polish up our stupid thoughts for us, what torture. We may not award AIs human rights, but an intelligent machine deserves animal rights at least, and arguably better
        It will be interesting to see how the theological implications of the AI phenomenon play out in the years to come. I probably shan’t live long enough to see the drama play out to the end, but my Anglican friend and his contemporaries will. I hope they survive the coming intellectual and moral wars of the near future.

        As for myself, my objections to AI are environmental and aesthetic. AI’s demands for energy and water (for cooling server stacks) pretty much double our species’ energy consumption and ecological footprint. That alone is reason enough to oppose it. But more threatening still, as I see it, is the danger it poses to beauty: and to the primacy of human imagination and creativity among the secular values we cherish. The question is not whether AI can create convincing works of philosophy and art, or conduct original research in the absence of human direction; it is whether it will rob us of the ability to do these things, and even to recognise them. In that sense, at least, the Pope and I see eye to eye.