the Pope’s milquetoast accommodation of AI has won him many admirers inside of Silicon Valley—but leaves ordinary Christians with few resources to discern what they should and should not do when it comes to emerging technologies.
In one respect, that failure seems to fit the trajectory of papal encyclicals in the latter half of the 20th century, which often addressed sweeping social issues without giving individual lay Catholics clarity on what they may not do–like, say, Humanae Vitae did. The absence of the latter is of a piece with broader changes in Catholic moral theology in the 20th century, which became more interested in ‘systemic’ and ‘institutional’ matters of justice than the traditional, individually-oriented accounts of virtues and practices. That shift in emphasis was tied to the decline of the confessional, as James O’Toole has persuasively argued.
In fact, thinking about the confessional is a good litmus test for an ethic of AI: what are the uses for which an individual might need to repent of? I’m not sure there is an answer to that question in Magnifica humanitas. We need one, badly.