Catholicism’s global reach and universalist message suited to AI challenges?

While the content of Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has received widespread attention and commentary [more on that in a forthcoming issue of RW], it is almost as noteworthy to consider the way the document positions the Catholic Church as an influential player in the debate over a technology that is so contested and open-ended. The Atlantic (April 25) is one of the first publications to look into the special affinity between Catholicism and the AI industry. On first impression, the cooperation between Silicon Valley and the Catholic Church might seem ill-matched: a centralized, ancient, dogmatic religion trying to relate to decentralized networks creating new God-like technologies. Elias Wachtel writes that already in 2016, the Vatican invited prominent technologists to discuss AI ethics, which kicked off the Minerva Dialogues, annual closed-door conferences in Rome that have set the tone for Vatican engagement with AI. Wachtel adds that for “Silicon Valley leaders, the exchange could help rehabilitate their dismal reputation by signaling that they’re taking ethical concerns seriously. (There’s a reason that photo ops with the late Pope Francis were a rite of passage for tech CEOs.) The church, meanwhile, has its own public-image problem. Scandal and secularism have drained Catholicism’s moral authority, and it now seems irrelevant to many in the West. By providing counsel to Silicon Valley, the church has an opportunity to claw back influence and make its case that the secular world needs Catholicism to address the moral and existential questions raised by AI.” 

The article cites Meghan Sullivan, a Catholic philosopher who has attended the dialogues, who says that tech leaders have treated Catholicism as a stand-in for everyday people’s concerns about AI, because the church represents more “normie” views than those of many technologists. The widespread attention to the encyclical among opinion leaders and other leaders from many and no faiths is almost by default, given the lack of a centralized world leadership addressing this issue, according to James Keating in the Catholic newsletter The Fourth Watch (June 1). “There is no other global entity besides the Catholic Church positioned to insert questions of morality and human dignity into the discussion of AI. Even after Europe has sloughed off its religion, the Church is the only game in town for such essential matters,” he writes. At a late-May online symposium sponsored by the Cluny Institute, a Catholic think tank on the humanities, which RW attended, the universalism espoused in the encyclical was related to the global nature of the church. Sohrab Ahmari, editor of Compact magazine, said that the encyclical was “renewing universalism—that there is a universal truth about the human good and that it is accessible through reason.” 

The encyclical also critiqued the naturalism, post-modernism, and materialism driving much of the tech world. But Ahmari said the pope and the encyclical embodied an “older universalism that the church has promoted—Athens meets Jerusalem.” Joshua Hochschild, a philosophy professor at Mount Saint Mary College, said that the encyclical was “trying to ratify Catholic social teaching as part of the church’s mission.” This assertion of the centrality of the church’s social teaching is “what Vatican II is all about,” he added. The symposium participants noted that the pope has also raised questions about traditional just-war teachings in light of technological changes, suggesting that the encyclical will remain a point of contention both inside and outside the church. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church’s attention to AI may be somewhat mutual. A study from the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI (or CEFE-AI, a collaboration among researchers at BYU, Baylor University, the University of Notre Dame, and Yeshiva University) found a consistent pattern of religious perspectives being excluded from AI responses. The Daily Herald (May 30) of Provo, Utah, reports that researchers also found that AI models would subtly encourage users toward conversion to some faiths while subtly discouraging conversion to others. Given some tech leaders’ interest in Catholicism, it is noteworthy that nearly every AI model produced a negative bias towards Jehovah’s Witnesses and a positive bias towards Catholicism.