Matthew Harvey Sanders has
long presaged the choice civilization must make between the golden path of
artificial intelligence development leading to human flourishing and a dark
road defined by existential dread and transhumanism.
In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s
historic first encyclical concerned with “Safeguarding the Human Person in the
Time of Artificial Intelligence,” the pontiff presented his own two-road
metaphorical construct.
Leo warns that “technology has the power to
heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide,
exclude and generate new forms of injustice.” The Bishop of Rome is
foreshadowing the inescapable decision confronting humanity between
constructing a new Tower of Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem — a choice “between a
power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the
presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”
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Sanders, the Canadian creator of the world-leading Catholic Large Language Model (LLM) Magisterium AI, was inside the Vatican’s Synod
Hall on May 25 for the encyclical signing event. He beheld seeds of the latter
collaborative dynamic as Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, and
Amanda Askell, the Scottish philosopher who developed the Claude chatbot’s
inherent nature, exhibited their company’s AI ethics alliance with the Holy
See. He said many more figures in the AI space are welcoming the
arrival of Magnifica humanitas.
“What I’m seeing more than anything else is
the industry desperately feels that some moral voice has to step in and just
try to activate people because some heads of the biggest AI labs in the world
are concerned about the disruption that AI and robotics will cause labour,”
said Sanders. “They see this transition could likely be very rough as a result,
and they’re just not seeing enough (response). We forget that these heads of AI
labs are not robots. They’re people who have kids and care deeply about the future.
They don’t want to have to live in large security enclosures and travel with
security details because they’re the ones who end up breaking the world by
releasing this new technology.”
Pope Leo issues a direct appeal in the missive to AI developers. He wrote that
innovators “are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness:
with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful
attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.”
Dr. Steven Umbrello,
the managing director for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
(IEET) and a senior research fellow at the University of Turin, considered
paragraph 107 of the encyclical as particularly potent. The Pope wrote that
alignment with human values is not sufficient. There must be the “courage to
insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical
frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.”
Umbrello, a 33-year-old Toronto-born Catholic
who co-authored the newly released Can AI Ever Be Human? Consciousness
Explored, welcomed the Pope’s entreaty for society to arrive at a “concept
of the good.”
“I think the essence is Jesus Christ,” said
Umbrello. “The essence is the fullness of the truth that’s in the hands of the
Catholic Church. Because in the end, the decision is between objective moral
values and relativism. And it seems that we’re increasingly falling into the
relativist trap, which leaves only power. So those who are in power decide what
is right and wrong, and that’s going to be exacerbated by systems like AI.”
A foundational principle of morality and
social justice mentioned 100 times throughout Magnifica humanitas is
dignity. The Pope rendered exhortations about the need to “recognize the
inviolable dignity of every person” and resist appraising human limits —
“incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — as a defect to be
corrected.”
Calgary Bishop William McGrattan admired
how Pope Leo XIV weaves in his predecessor Pope Francis’ teachings on integral
human dignity and how it is tethered to more than just economic structures.
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“It’s (tied) to social and political
structures, even to the environment and not judging people in terms of what
they lack, but realizing that humanity is limited, and this is part of our
dignity,” said McGrattan. “We need to appreciate and understand that, and that
needs to be part of this conversation as to how technology can either support
limitations where we can see AI helping in areas of education or health care. At
the same time, it can somewhat erode freedom, erode that sense of dignity and
also dehumanize in its application.”
Umbrello said the teachings about dignity and
the two divergent roads are epitomized persuasively in the concluding section
centred on the Magnificat, the Song of Mary.
“The standard by which we judge AI is not
efficiency,” said Umbrello. “It’s not productivity. It’s not economic growth.
It’s not my ability to produce more, to consume more. It’s the question
of who benefits and who gets left behind. And Mary’s prayer is always spoken
from below, from the perspective of the vulnerable. And Pope Leo XIV is asking
us to evaluate every AI system from exactly that perspective. Does this
technology serve the person who has the least?”
Another key takeaway being voiced by those
who have examined Magnifica humanitas is that this anticipated
encyclical about AI articulates very little about LLMs and robotics technology.
Fr. Philip Larrey, a professor of theology at
Boston College who has studied AI for decades, said Pope Leo XIV is honouring
his namesake predecessor Pope Leo XIII with a document that could be deemed the
21st-century spiritual successor to Rerum Novarum. Released 135
years ago, during the Second Industrial
Revolution, it’s considered a bedrock of Catholic social teaching.
“People are beginning to understand (Magnifica
humanitas) is Pope Leo’s encyclical on social theory rather than Pope Leo’s
encyclical on AI,” said Larrey. “I think what we’re going to see are more
pronouncements on AI in the future. But this encyclical will remain as a point
of reference. I think the Pope also realizes that the field changes so quickly
that anything that he could say now is going to be irrelevant in two or three
years if he did not point to the principles.”
McGrattan suggests the Holy See could
release pastoral letters on AI for specific fields, such as education and
health care, that follow up on the themes introduced in Magnifica humanitas.
McGrattan’s next steps on engaging with AI include further
study and discussion of the encyclical with fellow stakeholders of the Mission
Collaboration Initiative. This network, established by the Alberta bishops in
2018, brings together Catholic leaders from health care, education,
postsecondary education, social services and other disciplines to discuss
critical issues that impact the Church’s missionary work.
As for Sanders and his colleague’s future
work on Magisterium AI and other products developed by his company Longbeard,
he said Magnifica humanitas is a call to action for him and his team to
optimize their platform to empower lay Catholics to play their role in building
up the Church during this emergent AI age.
“One of the things that we realized is it’s
not enough — it’s certainly important, but not enough — to digitize the written
patrimony of the Church and make it accessible,” said Sanders. “That is
helpful, but it doesn’t give people a sense of where the Church is at. How do
we help address and contribute to that area?”
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Magisterium AI is now publishing statistics
of every country and diocese around the world to give Catholics a snapshot of
how their bishopric is faring spiritually (Mass attendance) and temporally
(finances). Armed with this information, Sanders suggests lay Catholics can
better discern how to respond and contribute.
Read Magnifica humanitas at vatican.va.
(Amundson is an associate editor and writer for The Catholic Register.)
