Upon taking the name Leo XIV earlier this year, the first American pope referred back to his 19th-century predecessor, Leo XIII, who forged a distinctive Catholic response to the challenge of industrialization. A similar religious response might be needed, the new Pope Leo suggested, to the new challenges posed by the “revolution” in Artificial Intelligence, which poses “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
These are strong words, but are they strong enough? Is the age of Artificial Intelligence primarily a novel moral and political challenge for Christians, promising socioeconomic turbulence and requiring a new application of Christian ethics to a shifting social order, a new economic vision to protect workers who might lose their jobs to chatbots and robots, a new political vision for an age of concentrated technological power? Or is its challenge more existential and metaphysical? How should Christians think about the potential replacement of human creativity by algorithmic processes, the rise of digital relationships with artificial persons (therapists, tutors, “romantic partners”), the transhumanist aspirations of some A.I. oligarchs? Is it possible, given biblical premises, for robots to become conscious? Does the advent of artificial intelligence pose a fundamental materialist challenge to Christian beliefs about the soul? Can this technology ultimately be mastered and used for good? Or does this revolution require some kind of Christian-humanist resistance?
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