The expansion of AI in the last two decades looks almost quaint compared to the explosion of public-facing generative AI in the last two years. Seemingly overnight the entire world of technology has shifted from search and social media to generative AI everywhere. We are neck deep in a new boom in artificial intelligence with no clear end in sight and no clear sense of the possibilities in the future. To quote philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor, we are entering a state of “acute technosocial opacity” where the future has become obscure to us.Footnote1
By contrast, theology and religion are not nimble fields. It is a slow, ponderous task to consider the ramifications of the principles of ancient faith in a world of blistering technological change. Pope Francis, for example, was born before the first programmable electronic digital computers were even invented, whereas US students that graduate college today have never known life without smartphones. Yet it is the task of theology itself to encounter modern culture, to understand it, and to view it through the lens of the millennia of Sacred Tradition. For Christian theological traditions still grappling with evolutionary theories, it is nothing short of a herculean task to consider even further impacts of revolutionary scientific and technological change in a vast and inequitable world. And yet it is an urgent and vital one, for while many scholars have begun to produce good work in this space, many more are hoping to join the conversation but are unable to find a foothold either within or near their theological discipline.
With these dual needs for both original reflection and novel theological footholds in mind, we are grateful for this space to announce the publication of the first volume of the Theological Investigations of Artificial Intelligence Book Series, published in collaboration with the Journal of Moral Theology and Wipf & Stock. These books are being written by the AI Research Group of the Centre for Digital Culture at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, and the first book is entitled Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations and freely available online.Footnote2 While the Vatican has initiated advances in discussions of ethical technology and specifically AI in the past, such as the Rome Call for AI EthicsFootnote3 or the Institute for Technology Ethics and Culture’s ITEC Handbook,Footnote4 this volume represents a new, extended exploration of the philosophical and theological points of intersection between AI and the deep well that is the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition. With this in mind, we would like to take this time to highlight several novel insights from this volume that may be of particular interest to the Theology & Science readership and that we hope will have lasting theological implications.
First, the book begins with a strong discussion of secular AI ethics via a theological lens, not seeking to recreate the wheel theologically but build upon the rich work already done. Encountering AI thus begins by encountering this largely secular work and considering the important terrain it has covered, arranged by ethical approach. For example, much of the work related to AI ethics in a practical setting consists of sets of ethical principles … many, many, many sets of principles, including those proposed by corporations, academics, and governments.Footnote5 Some of the most commonly found principles include transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, and security and privacy (these are, incidentally, the six principles in the Rome Call for AI Ethics). Human rights offer a framework similar to principles, but with the benefit of international codification into many documents and laws.Footnote6 In addition to this principles-first approach, some critical approaches to AI emphasize the social pathologies that embed into AI, perpetuating injustice, harming the environment, and centralizing economic power.Footnote7 Other examples include the casuistic approach, which works by building analogies from widely-agreed-upon paradigmatic cases, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal or science fiction stories, such as the “Metaverse” in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; and the utilitarian approach, common not only in corporate cost-benefit analysis, but also among more idealistic philosophies such as effective altruism and its child, “longtermism.”Footnote8 Multiple other ethical systems are considered, including consequentialism, deontology, and, finally (but not surprisingly) virtue ethics. A recent standout in technological virtue ethics is Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues, which can serve both as a secular approach to AI ethics as well as a bridge to the tradition of Catholic virtue ethics.
Second, following this discussion, chapters 2-5 of Encountering AI then describe why AI can’t be conscious and should not be treated as a person or as a replacement for people in relationships or religion. While AI models might seem to produce human-like outputs, we humans ought not be fooled. Imitating a human does not make something human, and that such imitations would exist should not surprise us: we made them that way. The large language models (LLMs) that we are interacting with are trained on human-generated data, which is processed through algorithms created by humans for the express purpose of producing human-like writing. These LLMs are initially evaluated by human beings via reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to make them act in specific ways prior to release, and are then continuously re-evaluated by human users who can approve or disapprove of the LLM’s answers over time (another layer of RLHF). All of these things contribute to creating a human-like LLM, but none of them should make us think that an LLM is conscious. And if there is no consciousness, there can be no personhood, nor genuine human relationship.
Third, beginning in chapter 6, this book examines the way in which the theologies of Catholic social teaching, especially through the theology of Pope Francis, can engage with AI.Footnote9 Examining the discussions of technology in Laudato Si, Evangelii Gaudium, and Fratelli Tutti, the book finds novel connections and a compelling theological narrative that centers on the role of the family, “where we first learn the foundations of social responsibility and put them into practice.”(159) The book then moves into discussions of a wide range of communities that are deeply impacted by AI, beginning with the family, that smallest of communities where our the earliest encounters of technology are mediated. Flowing from a rich theology of the family, the book moves into discussions of education, health care, law, military, work, and communication, reflecting at each juncture on the impact of Catholic Social Teaching and Pope Francis’ pontificate in the ethical dilemma facing nearly all sectors of society. For example, in discussing the question of work and the economy, we explain how contemporary tech giants remain subject to the ancient demand for human dignity in the workplace, including the consistent calls for labor unions as well as for industries that reflect the values of “integral ecology,” where care for the Earth is not a superfluous extension of human dignity, but a reflection of a deep and Biblical tradition where “environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked.”Footnote10 (208) In this way, the book invites scholars who would not primarily discuss AI to see their work as deeply interwoven with discussions of climate change, work, human dignity, and the common good.
Fourth and finally, the title of the book, Encountering Artificial Intelligence, was chosen specifically to highlight a way of understanding modern technology that moves beyond a theology of technocratic paradigms. This is not to negate the power and the cost to human dignity of the technocratic paradigm, as articulated consistently by Pope Francis, but to emphasize that the alternative to a paradigm of mastery and materiality is one of encounter. It is important here to relay that we are but two of the many scholars involved in the writing of this book, with different roles and contributing to different parts of the conversation. We note this now in order to say that this theme of encounter began as a side note early in our conversations but grew into a recurring theme, holding the language of a true positive alternative to a theological approach that can often view technology in only negative terms. To encounter AI is not to say that AI is a person, but that to encounter AI is to open ourselves to the encounter of all people, communities, and creatures that affect and are affected by new technologies, and to have faith that through these encounters, which reflect, individually and collectively, our encounter with God, we can help to create a better world.
No matter what else is gained from the volume, it is meant first and foremost to be an invitation. It is an invitation to consider Christian theology with new anthropological and ethical relevance to contemporary matters of technology. It is an invitation for Catholics, Protestants, other Christians, and indeed all people of faith to consider their own tradition anew in light of the urgent ethical problems caused by the growth in AI. And it is an invitation for all scholars to critique, dialogue with, encounter, and imagine a new world of AI that is made more holy and more just, as to decline this invitation would be to risk the opposites. A novel technological future need not be the death knell of the world or humanity, and it need not continue to bring about further global inequality, environmental degradation, and oppression. If there is a community on earth who excels at constructing systems of hope from what seems hopeless, it is the ancient and living global community of believers. We hope that this book is a small part in this imagining, and we invite your partnership in the long (yet briskly-paced) road ahead.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John P. Slattery
John P. Slattery is the Director of the Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law at Duquesne University.
Brian Green
Brian Patrick Green is the Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
Notes
1 Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6.
2 The online version can be found at http://tinyurl.com/EncounteringAI, or https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-artificial-intelligence-ethical-and-anthropological-investigations. The book series is co-edited by Matthew Gaudet, Jason King, and M. Therese Lysaught.
3 The RenAIssance Foundation, “The Rome Call for AI Ethics,” The Rome Call website, 2020. https://www.romecall.org/
4 José Roger Flahaux, Brian Patrick Green, and Ann Gregg Skeet, Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap (The ITEC Handbook), Markkula Center for Applied Ethics website, 2023. https://www.scu.edu/institute-for-technology-ethics-and-culture/itec-handbook/
5 Anna Jobin, Marcello Ienca, and Effy Vayena, “The Global Landscape of AI Ethics Guidelines,” Nature Machine Intelligence 1 (2019): 389–99. doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2
6 Filippo Raso, Hannah Hilligoss, Vivek Krishnamurthy, Christopher Bavitz, and Kim Levin, “Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights: Opportunities & Risks,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Publication (2018), nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:38021439
7 E.g., Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1–15, https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf; Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?,” Proceedings of FAccT ‘21, (March 3–10, 2021): 610–623, doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
8 William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (New York: Basic Books, 2022).
9 The intersection of CST and AI is an emerging field in Catholic scholarship, with several notable essays appearing in a special issue of Journal of Moral Theology 11, s1 (2022), including “Artificial Intelligence and Social Control: Ethical Issues and Theological Resources” by Andrea Vicini, SJ, https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/34123-artificial-intelligence-and-social-control-ethical-issues-and-theological-resources and “Artificial Intelligence and the Marginalization of the Poor,” by Levi Checketts, https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/34125-artificial-intelligence-and-the-marginalization-of-the-poor
10 Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, paragraph 56. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.