You Will Be Gary Kasparov
Readers and I respond to AI and Magnifica Humanitas
Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is an encyclical that is as much about what humans are as about what AI may become. I’ve got a piece up at First Things (“Worth Beyond Our Works”) on what Pope Leo has to say about human value when, like Gary Kasparov, we’re no longer best.
In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo singles out as “particularly insidious” the ideology that “suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth.” This view—where the human person is born in debt, and eventually buys him or herself free—obviously puts the very young and the very old in danger. But now it imperils many others who fear they will not be able to justify their lives if their labor can be done more cheaply and speedily by AI.
The encyclical has advice about how to apply the principles of Catholic social teaching to blunt the economic turbulence anticipated over the next ten years, but it has much more to say about why people cannot be treated as interchangeable parts, easy to throw away. Most importantly, the Church sees human dignity as springing from our being, not our doing. As Pope Leo writes: “The dignity of every human being can be described as infinite . . . for two reasons: first, because the love of God, who calls us to friendship with him, is infinite; and second, his love is absolutely unconditional, in the sense that, even if we search endlessly, we will never find anything that can erase or deny it.” […]
The coming years will sharply remind everyone of their finitude, of the fragility of an identity grounded in our doing. For those who do not know God, what alternatives will be open to them? What other avenues are there to find an identity in our being, not our doing? If you set God aside, there are still parts of our identities that are received as a gift, not won as a prize. They are the marks of particularity—being born as a man or a woman, into a particular nation, as a member of a particular race. However, when these markers are the seat of someone’s self-worth, they lead to rivalry and attempts to establish hierarchy. As AI capacities surge, I would expect to see more of these fragmented identities attract populist energies. They offer a possible answer to the question of the coming years: “What gives you worth, if not what you can do?”
Ultimately, I think Magnifica Humanitas will be remembers as much as a pro-life encyclical as a AI encyclical.
As Pope Leo wrote, in one of the most Other Feminisms-y passages in the encyclical:
The limit, the heart and the grandeur of the human person
118. Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.
Christy reflected on this passage in our Magnifica Humanitas open thread:
This is the section I keep coming back to, over and over again. The entire argument about AI actually hinges on this understanding of who is human, and how and why, and what it means to be human, and what is and is not part of the human experience. I've read these few paragraphs a half dozen times already.
Penelope connected Pope Leo’s encyclical to another book I really like:
You intrigued me with your prompt about how Pope Leo’s account of human dignity might clash with meritocracy, because I recently read an interesting book that criticizes meritocracy.
The book is The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. Sandel argues that meritocracy is not as great or fair as it seems because people who are already fortunate have the greatest advantages, it ignores chance and luck, and it encourages people to be sore losers and sore winners. Sandel also argues that a better way includes taking luck (good and bad) into account and finding and supporting a vision of the common good. He convinced me with his arguments, and I can’t wait to see how Pope Leo’s encyclical discusses dignity and the common good.
Kevin noted how true one passage rang in the hardest moments:
My grandmother died this past week. We were very close, and I managed to visit her the night before her death, despite being warned by an aunt that she was "not the Nanny you remember." (She was indeed in rough condition, but she still recognized me and we exchanged some very heartfelt words.) So, naturally, this is the sentence that stood out to me: "To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well." Exactly right!
A major theme of Magnifica Humanitas is that it’s important to take the right risks. Although some people anticipated that the Pope would anathematize AI, the encyclical is fairly dynamist. The Pope exhorts his people, “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time.”
For The New Atlantis, I have a piece arguing that the Pope is both more ambitious and more hopeful than some of the loudest futurists:
In its colloquial usage, humility can be misunderstood as performative smallness. The person who aggressively dodges praise — “It was nothing,” “I didn’t do much,” “Please don’t mention it” — is sometimes described as humble because she appears to reject pride in her work and recognition from others.
This kind of humility is focused on seeking smallness in isolation, whereas true humility is relational — a person is always small in relationship to God’s sublime largeness. In contrast, perfecting yourself through self-abnegating humility means becoming smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. Rationalist Ozy Brennan glosses this form of humility as “the life goals of dead people.” If you seek humility by seeking to minimize harm, or minimize the demands you make, then the best kind of person is one who isn’t there.
The swaggering e/acc — effective accelerationists who look at building as an inherent good — may sound like the opposite of this form of self-erasing humility. They want to play a big role in authoring the future, and they want that future to sprawl across the solar system and then the galaxy. But, for all the grandiosity of their goals, they share a horror at the human person with those who long to be small. An e/acc manifesto states that they are posthumanists, not transhumanists, because they have “no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life.” They have the self-erasing humility of the person who wants to be permanently passed over. They have a misplaced hunger for an intelligence that far excels humans, and that, because it surpasses us, cannot love us or exist in relation to us. It is hard for them to imagine why a truly superior being would care more for us than we do for ants. They propose a kind of silicon supercessionism: an indifferent sublime, God without the Incarnation.
I’m grateful that AI is awakening people’s desire to talk about what it means to be human.