AI: Happiness Only a Click Away?
The progress of technology allows for a better quality of life thanks to tools it would be hard for us to live without. In this respect, what we conventionally call “artificial intelligence” (AI) certainly represents a major advance: it can, for example, save precious time in the medical field, saving lives, and in research, thanks to its speed of execution and synthesis.
To define artificial intelligence, we can say that it is a machine whose behavior, once the work has been done, would be considered intelligent if it was done by a human. The fundamental difference between it and a human intelligence is that AI, although capable of doing very complex tasks, offering appropriate answers, processing an impressive amount of data and improving its own efficiency, cannot truly think or abstract, and is incapable of any aesthetic, moral or religious sense. Locked inside of the limits of mathematical logic, AI has no emotions and no empathy, is incapable of comprehending human realities such as an illness, a dispute or a reconciliation, or the contemplation of a beautiful landscape. In other words, no AI, no matter how sophisticated, will ever be truly human, capable of consoling you when you are sad, or capable of love. You can neither pray for the salvation of its soul nor ask it to marry you.
The Church is no enemy of progress; in fact, she has always promoted everything that contributes to civilization. Following the example of the popes that came before him, Pius XII declared that “the Church loves and favors human progress. It is undeniable that technical progress comes from God and therefore can and ought to lead to God.”1
The danger comes from its poorly controlled use. Pius XII warned us, in the same speech, against a “technological spirit,” a mistaken view of life and the world, that would lead us to see “the perfection of earthly culture and happiness” in technology alone. Applying his comments to a poorly mastered use of AI, we can point out two dangers among many others.
Fascination for That Which Seems Infinite
“In its many varied uses, in the absolute confidence which it awakens, in the extraordinary possibilities that it promises, modern technology displays before man so vast a vision as to be confounded by many with the Infinite itself.”
—Pius XII, Radio Message to the World, 12/24/1953, n. 11
With AI, we can have an answer to everything, access to everything, and the ability to synthesize everything. We can prove everything, create everything, images, videos, scenarios. It is intoxicating. This leads, says Pius XII, to a “sense of self-sufficiency and satisfaction of [man’s] boundless thirst for knowledge and power,” in which satisfaction is close at hand, just a few clicks away. And while St. Augustine reminds us that we are made for God and that our heart is restless until it rests in Him, there is a temptation to turn to AI, hypothetically capable of attaining superhuman capacities, and to expect it to help us find a meaning to this life.
A document from the Holy See2 points this out, reminding us that “AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material…and sustained through human labor.” The document cites the Book of Wisdom on idols and human creations: “For a man made them, and one whose spirit is borrowed formed them; for no man can form a god which is like himself. He is mortal, and what he makes with lawless hands is dead, for he is better than the objects he worships since he has life, but they never have (Wis. 15:16-17).”
This document, for one who knows how to make useful distinctions, is a good basis for understanding what is at stake with AI.
The Abdication of Intelligence Properly Speaking and Loss of Judgment
What begins as a fascination for technological progress turns into an absence of personal reflection out of convenience. Man bears the image and likeness of God because he is endowed with intelligence. Systematically entrusting his reflection or an artistic creation to a computer does not make him more intelligent or more of an artist—far from it. Used excessively and indiscriminately, AI tends to replace man’s intellectual and artistic abilities: “The extensive use of AI in education could lead to the students’ increased reliance on technology, eroding their ability to perform some skills independently and worsening their dependence on screens.”3 To this, we have to add that seeking ready-made answers without reasoning through them diminishes our judgment.
“The danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of humans accustomed from their earliest childhood to wanting nothing more than what machines can give.”
—Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots
“God’s intellect is infinitely comprehensive, whereas the ‘technological spirit’ makes every effort to restrict in man the free expansion of his intelligence.” Pius XII offers the key to the issue: intelligence is first in God, who gives man an ability to know that is open to being, to the real, and therefore to God. Inversely, an inappropriate and irresponsible use of AI, in this sense more artificial than intelligence, inhibits more or less extensively, in the long run, man’s cognitive abilities and therefore the adequation of his intelligence to the real, and ultimately to God Himself.
The pope then offers the remedy: “The technologist who would free himself from this limitation needs not only an education of mind that aims at depth of knowledge, but above all he needs a religious formation which, despite what is sometimes asserted, is the kind most apt to safeguard his thought from one-sided influences… Otherwise, this era of technological progress will achieve its monstrous masterpiece, making man into a giant of the physical world, at the expense of his soul, reduced to a pygmy in the realm of the supernatural and eternal.”
“They might have found the necessary had they not sought the superfluous.”
—Seneca, Letter 45
We will never convince everyone. But let those who understand ask for the grace and strength to know how to put their intelligence to work using books, accepting to be guided so that they may acquire a true formation, alas increasingly rare, in which they learn how to do without the tool so as to know how to use it without becoming its slave. And as Seneca invites us to do, let them seek—for themselves and for their children—a healthy philosophy with a sense of analogy, still offered by a few rare good schools.
To use the tool correctly, it is good to form our intelligence at the school of true masters. The proliferation of uncontrollable information encourages the formation of self-taught men, equally uncontrollable and poorly formed, with little intellectual rigor (or a false logic). A poorly formed mind will hold as true whatever pleases it and whatever is proposed to it, not knowing how to discern a proposition’s degree of truth (faith, certitude, opinion). Such a mind thinks it has understood what it reads but deforms it, imposing its own understanding and way of understanding. We did not need AI to have poorly formed minds, but without a true intellectual formation, their numbers will continue to increase.
Endnotes
1 Radio Message to the world, 12/24/1953. Translation taken from Pius XII, On Modern Technology and Peace (National Catholic Welfare Conference, Washington DC). Available online at https://distantreader.org/stacks/pamphlets/pdf/005195657.pdf
2 Antiqua et Nova, 1/14/25. See https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html.
3 Antiqua et Nova, n. 81.