"We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." - Steve Jobs
Pope Leo XIV (pictured above) begs to disagree with Mr. Jobs. Pope Leo has recently issued an "encyclical letter," an official statement by the Pope on religious matters, and the Pope is warning the world that "artificial intelligence threatens to normalize an anti-human vision.”
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the Pope's statement should be understood as both a "criticism" and a "rebuke," coming from the first American Pope, "challenging a technological revolution incubated in the U.S. and supported by our current president, who has lashed out at the pontiff for criticizing the war in Iran." The Journal goes on to say that "Leo’s emphasis on threats to individuals’ human dignity and opposition to autonomous weapons casts him in contrast to techno-optimists who argue that AI will usher in a productivity revolution and that the U.S. must deploy its advances militarily before rivals such as China do."
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published with great ceremony on Monday his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity.” The 42,300-word policy statement is respectful and named no names, but is at heart a sharp rebuke to Silicon Valley’s assertions that it alone can be trusted to develop the future.
Whether we denominate the Pope's encyclical as a "religious" or as a "spiritual" statement, the essence of what the Pope is saying is clear. The reality upon which we ultimately depend (for everything) is not a "human creation," and our periodic and presumptuous assertions to the contrary are not only misguided but (if I may be excused for using this word), "demonic."
According to the Lord's Prayer, "Evil" is an actual reality, and is not just a word that we employ to categorize something that we don't particularly like. Those who recite the words of the Lord's Prayer, which acknowledge also the reality of God, ask the Creator of the World to "deliver us" from evil.
The Pope does not, for a minute, think we are "as gods," and he knows evil when he hears it - and hears of it. Let us all, like the Pope, refuse to succumb to the temptation to elevate our own creations to be equal to, or even greater than, The World That God Created.
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