In the Beginning Was Not the Algorithm
It had to happen sometime, for Daniel Ang and I dropped our latest episode of Awkward Asian Theologians over the weekend, on AI.
It would have been easy for two non-technicians to wax lyrical on the technical problems surrounding Artificial Intelligence, so we stuck to the theological lane and focused on Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas.
We do not mean to put readers off, but the encyclical was rather large, so in the space of a single half hour (-ish…it was a tad longer than our previous episode on priesthood) episode, we could only focus on the highlights of the document itself.
Drawing on those highlights, we were able to tease out a few threads worthy of further consideration.
The first is how this encyclical continues the trajectory of a more-than-century old tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, going all the way back to the Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum.
Second, in spite of the similarity of subject matter, Daniel and I suggested that the underlying concern remained constant, namely the subordination of humanity to technology (the constancy of which may also highlight how we probably have not learned anything as a species).
Third, and flowing out of this constant, we to-ed and fro-ed over the nub of the crisis of AI outside of the economic. Indeed, we suggested that even before the economic, the beating heart of the crisis of AI is the ongoing crisis over what we mean when we say “the human person”. Growing out of this, the question for Christians is not so much how to resist AI, but how to engage in genuine Christian witness in the wake of AI and the underlying questions that remain yet unanswered.
This episode only scratched the surface of what is otherwise one of the most significant additions to the corpus of Catholic Social Teaching. It will certainly be a joyful challenge to work this into the next iteration of my Catholic Social Teaching half-course next year.
“In the Beginning Was Not the Algorithm” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcast.
If you have listened to our highlight episode and would want to learn more about the encyclical, my friend Dr Caitlin West’s Crash Course Catholicism put out a five-part series on the encyclical (which you can begin with by clicking here), a very worthy deeper dive.
