Spirituality

One of the debates on the internet now is whether Pope Leo missed the boat by dealing with AI in his encyclical as just another tool.

Michael
Pakaluk

When Friedrich Wohler in 1828 synthesized urea, the first organic compound to be manufactured in a laboratory, the popular newspapers of the day received the news as an earth-shattering development, which, they said, destroyed the distinction between living and non-living things. Scientists, too, with a materialist agenda, beat the drum. Berthelot, for instance, in his treatise on organic chemistry, declared: "To banish life from all explanations relating to organic chemistry: that is the object of our studies."
But today, the fact that 180 tons of urea is synthesized each year for use in fertilizers is correctly regarded as having no philosophical implications whatsoever.
Or take citric acid, synthesized for use as a preservative, or salicylic acid, used in aspirin. We unthinkingly use these molecules, these manufactured micro-tools, and never suppose that "what it means to be human" has changed because of them.

We cannot even imagine the excitement it caused because it seems so strange to us, but something similar happened when intense colors were first synthesized. It was supposed before then that colors came from naturally occurring substances: consider flowers or clays. But in 1856, William Perkin, an 18-year-old chemistry graduate student, accidentally synthesized mauve from coal tar. The reaction was extraordinary. Was color no longer a natural creation? We can see now that the hullabaloo over a putative metaphysical revolution in human life was misguided.
Early users of the telephone were disturbed by the fact of disembodied voices. For Edison, apparently, it was a natural next step to communicate with the dead through something like a telephone: "I have been at work for some time," he wrote, "building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us."
One of the debates on the internet now is whether Pope Leo missed the boat by dealing with AI in his encyclical as just another tool. No, critics say, this is a tool that changes our understanding of ourselves. It actually reshapes consciousness. This is no ordinary tool: it is a revolutionary technology.
Sure, I say, and so was urea, synthetic mauve, and the telephone.
Maybe these critics are not using AI enough. They are like people who are encountering synthetic organic compounds for the first time. But those of us who use it on a daily basis for nearly everything, from mundane tasks such as creating expense reports or reformatting CVs, to difficult questions such as (in my own case) evaluating competing translations of ancient Greek, are likely to say, rather: ho hum. It's a tool, kind of a dumb tool, when all is taken into account, with limitations that become obvious through familiarity.
I was speaking about this recently with Peter Clooney, one of the creators (along with his brother, Thomas) of Acutis AI, named after the saint who built a website when he was 10 years old. Likewise, Peter began coding when he was a boy. He is an "AI optimist" and a firm believer, too, that new technologies should be embraced by Catholics for use even from an early age, but used by children under the guidance of their parents and with guardrails.
Currently, he is a rising senior at the University of Dallas. "I agree with the Holy Father," he said, "that it's just another tool. But I even think that LLMs (large language models) are already peaking. They'll continue to be increasingly useful, but in substance, they will not change from what they are already. They will not take over the world, for instance, as people fear." He says that AI is continuous with earlier technologies and only appears to be a big break, metaphysically, because of the very rapid pace at which it has been adopted.
Acutis AI is an app that, in matters of faith and morals, consults its library of reliable sources, such as the Catechism and St. Thomas's "Summa." But for other queries, it sits atop a commercial AI, which users can stipulate (Peter prefers Claude, as do I). It is distinctive because it is being developed for use by children. It will speak to the child's level and will allow ample parental controls. Eventually, it will build in the possibility for parents to "train" the AI better by suggesting improvements to how Acutis answers questions.
I asked him about the pope's encyclical. What did he think the big takeaways were? "The Holy Father is using AI to evangelize to big tech," he said, "And this is good. Tech leaders are realizing that the ethical principles they see as necessary to guide AI have been taught for decades within 'Catholic social teaching.'"
What did he think was the most important message of the encyclical? "A lot of the talk about AI is speculation about the future. But what happens with AI is not outside our control. The Holy Father wants to get ahead of the curve and guide people in how to build it well."
Peter and his brother are doing just that. You and I can do our part by patronizing Acutis AI, or, although they have different strengths, Truthly or Magisterium. And as a personal matter, it's valuable to begin building good habits of AI use, which we can bring forward into the future.

- Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His latest book is "Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew's Gospel.'' You may follow him on Substack at MichaelJosephPakaluk.Substack.com.

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