In this episode of Catholic Answers Live Flannel Panel, Cy Kellett is joined by Joe Heschmeyer and Chris Check to explore how Pope Leo XIV could shape the world’s response to artificial intelligence. They discuss where Popes have influenced the development of technology in the past and how Pope Leo can tackle the AI crisis in the present.
Transcript:
Cy: Cardinal Cupich was trying to explain why Pope Leo XIII, the Industrial Revolution, and this new AI revolution are something similar. I thought the single dumbest question I’ve ever heard a cardinal ask was then asked: what possibly could the Catholic Church do to regulate or police or control artificial intelligence? Like what? Like his interpretation of… I don’t think… What do they think Pope Leo does? Like, if he says one of the main issues we’re gonna have to deal with, do they think that Pope Leo thinks he’s gonna make world laws or something?
Joe: I would love to see AI end up on the Index Prohibitorium, that it’s just like a prohibited book you’re not allowed to read.
Cy: You can’t use AI? Well, how would you do the show, Joe? Oh, sorry.
Joe: Exactly. Great point.
Chris: I mean, don’t we have some fairly recent examples of the Church bringing a lot of influence to bear on certain questions of technology? I think of cloning, for example.
Cy: Yes, that’s a very good point.
Chris: I mean, the Church said, no, we’re not gonna do cloning.
Cy: Eugenics was another one.
Joe: Yeah, we’re not gonna do this.
Chris: So there are things within the operation of so-called artificial intelligence that the Church very well and should very much so speak on.
Cy: But it’s the conflating of political power with moral leadership. Like the incredulity that someone could exercise moral leadership without having political power. Like the… well, what could you do about AI? That was the tenor of the question. Why does the Pope care about this? He can’t do anything about it.
Joe: That’s very strange.
Joe: Well, it’s kind of the modern version of like, how many battalions does the Pope have?
Cy: Yeah, right. It does seem like that. That was Stalin, right, that asked that? Or Khrushchev or somebody.
Chris: Although there’s an admission in the fact that the woman is asking the question.
Joe: It was a guy.
Chris: Oh, sorry. That fellow was asking the question. I don’t watch Meet the Press.
Cy: Well, you probably are very much smarter for not watching it.
Chris: But there’s an admission in the fact that he’s asking the question that he concedes that the Pope has some authority, whether he’s prepared to work it out in his logic or not. He’s expecting the Pope to say something.
Cy: Yeah, but he does. But it’s pointless. To me, this question struck me: what’s the point of the Pope saying anything? He doesn’t have it. What’s he gonna do? Pass a law? Like, he can’t regulate it. He can’t police it.
Chris: I don’t know what he’s thinking. I actually think he’s probably acknowledging in a clumsy way that the Church has a tremendous amount of authority in the world.
Joe: I wanna suggest a term that I think might be behind the questioner’s question and part of a broader spirit we should be on the lookout for. The term I wanna propose, and maybe someone else has already gotten there, is techno nihilism.
Here’s how I would argue it. In the recent past, there was a prevailing spirit of kind of techno progressivism, that technology was going to come along and make all of our lives better and better. And, you know, just imagine someday soon robots are going to come and take away all the hard parts of work and you’ll be able to do just easy stuff and make a comfortable living, et cetera, et cetera.
And then not only have those dreams not been fulfilled, but something nearer the opposite in many cases, where rather, technology is often taking the good jobs and leaving behind… you know, you can now work in an Amazon factory and for a robot. Probably for a robot. Right. Quite seriously. Or just no jobs are available because they can all be filled by robots.
Chris: And one more thing. These have increased the pace with which we work. Not created…
Cy: That’s right. Yeah. It’s more frantic than it used to be.
Chris: Yeah. You’re never free if you have a smartphone. You’re never free, ma’am.
Joe: So the promise was, now you can work from the beach. And now it just turns out when you’re at the beach, you’re still at work.
Cy: Yeah, right.
Joe: I mean, that’s kind of how it’s been perversely fulfilled. And so in the face of that, the defenders of technology and its latest forms don’t really say, oh, no, it’s actually really good. It’s really making you happier because by almost every measurable criteria, it is not. And so instead, the argument just becomes, well, it’s inevitable. Like, you can’t do anything about it. Like, this is the future. So, you know…
What are you… what are you going to do about it?
Cy: I think that, that, that… that is true, Joe. I didn’t detect… I didn’t articulate that. But that is part of what bothered me about the question: it’s just a resignation, like, what are you going to do about this? Yeah, I didn’t care what you think, Pope.
Joe: Right. And so it’s just like, well, just give up. And honestly, the people who want this stuff to happen, this is how they argue it. This is what happens when people argue, oh, you can’t hold that view on marriage or sexuality or whatever because you’ll be on the wrong side of history. They’re not saying we have better arguments. They’re just saying you’re gonna lose, so you might as well give up.
Cy: That’s a very good point.
Joe: That’s the argument.
Chris: But if you…
Joe: Oh, go ahead.
Chris: I was just gonna relate this back to Pope Leo XIII with Rerum Novarum, that there is a material difference in the way modernity turned out because the Pope wrote Rerum Novarum. I don’t think people appreciate that or understand that, that the way that the relationship between workers and bosses and owners played out over the course of the 20th century was materially and significantly impacted because the Pope wrote Rerum Novarum in whatever it was, 1893 or 4 or whatever.
Joe: Yeah. And we avoided two extremes: like we avoided the Industrial Revolution just getting worse and worse at a time when it seemed probably inevitable to many people that it would just get worse.
And we also avoided the kind of radical solution of something like communism. And Leo spoke very clearly against both kinds of risks. And you know, that’s not to say we don’t see the excesses of capitalism or…
Cy: No, it doesn’t make the world perfect.
Joe: We didn’t see the communist revolution. So of course we saw those things. And yet looking back, even 50 years later, you would say, oh, wow, the world in the mid-20th century, post-war, obviously seems like a much healthier place for workers than it was at the beginning of the 20th century and in places that weren’t communist countries.
Joe: And it does seem like Leo and those who were inspired by him played a major hand in that.
Cy: Yeah. When you think of the kind of Adenauer Christian Democrats of mid-century Europe, they took their cues directly from Catholic social teaching, or if not directly, indirectly. Like that is, this was in the atmosphere that built. Now, I’m not saying that they built something perfect in Germany, but it’s a heck of a lot better than what was there before 1945, you know?
Joe: Right. It’s true.
Cy: So I think that the fact that Leo is saying the Church needs to provide moral leadership as it breaks into what looks like a completely new era is a very hopeful sign. It’s not a bad sign at all.
Chris: The Church can be helpful in these situations in this particular topic or field. Leo is, I think, very much Francis’ successor.
Because Francis devoted a good bit of his writing to talking about what he called the technocratic paradigm, for example.
And its own internal logic, as he described it, and the way it controls.
Cy: Yeah. I actually think that, to me, that always struck me as one of the critiques of modernity that was in Francis’ pontificate was the strongest part of his pontificate. I think that is a well that you could draw from and really profitably draw on that.
Joe: And it actually draws on a longer tradition. Like Francis is squarely in continuity with his immediate predecessors from Paul VI forward. There’s a great line in *Spe Salvi*. It’s paragraph 22 where Benedict quotes Theodore Adorno in his critiques of progressivism and saying, in the 20th century, Theodore W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith and progress quite drastically. He said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Like, wow, it’s quite striking, you know, that just blindly believing the newer, bigger thing is better is like thinking, well, it’s better that we have atomic bombs than slingshots.
Cy: And the thing about the Church, too, is it’s not a Luddite Church. I think sometimes when people think, oh, the Church wants to have a say in the whole AI conversation, don’t presume that you know what the Church is going to say. She’s going to draw on pools of wisdom that are quite deep. And she’s not going to say… she’s not just going to say, stop it, everybody, stop it. She’s not going to take the Bob Newhart route.
But there’s the music. We got to take a quick break. Right back with more Flannel Panel on Catholic Answers Live.