On Monday, the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence). To be sure, we are Anglicans and not Roman Catholics, and we don’t have the same relationship to the Pope as our Catholic siblings do. But this letter is addressed to Christians throughout the world, and indeed to all people of good will. It’s worth engaging with in that spirit. The debut of this document has been an important event for me personally, as I sit on the House of Bishops theology committee on artificial intelligence. I encourage everyone to take a look at it, or at least at some articles about it. (It’s 180 pages long!) Here’s the (very compelling) video “trailer” for the encyclical. Here’s the Vatican panel discussion featuring a number of prominent scholars, which I woke up at 5:30 AM on Monday to watch live. Here’s a short summary. And here’s the whole thing.
One of the overarching images Leo uses is the contrast between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem in Nehemiah. The Tower of Babel, he writes, “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other.” The rebuilding of Jerusalem proceeds from a different basis, “not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.” The challenge that AI presents to us is the challenge of remaining resolutely human in a world that chafes at limits, that devalues the mutuality of relationship, that prizes efficiency above anything else.
There is much that we can do, each in our own lives, day by day:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love. (Magnifica Humanitas 213)
May we all play our part in building that civilization of love in all we do, here at Trinity Church and in our community of Princeton.
In Christ,
Kara+