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For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket. The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have more and more yet live less and less like human beings, a tension that AI is likely to exacerbate.
Many AI critics who write from a secular perspective, by contrast, tend to speak about artificial intelligence in utilitarian terms. Technology journalists, academic experts, and activists typically emphasize the AI industry’s prodigious environmental toll, its reliance on intellectual-property theft, its exacerbation of racialized algorithmic bias, its use in dangerous autonomous weapons systems, its role in warrantless surveillance, its exploitation of cheap foreign-labor markets, its upending of the domestic labor market at home, and the like.
These concerns are pressing—arguably the most pressing issues presented by AI—and spotlighting them is good and right. They are measurable harms that can be quantified, and that regulations and policy can be built around. The pope writes about many of these in his encyclical. But an overly pragmatic focus risks being morally and philosophically shallow, and leaving comparatively underexplored the more foundational questions that new large language models pose. After all, even if all of these concrete problems with AI were magically solved—if the environmental externalities were fixed, if better protections for workers were put in place, if artificial intelligence was not pressed into the service of war or surveillance or naked profit—we would still be left with a technology that radically unsettles many traditional conceptions of human dignity and meaning, and that threatens to outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines.
This is what the most thoughtful Christian critics are able to see. Illich wrote in 1971, when the rise of the computer was the primary technological concern, that man “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.” He concluded, “We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.”
Today, AI puts “man” even more at stake, as many of Silicon Valley’s leaders attempt to bring about a digital successor species, based on the belief that humanity’s evolutionary destiny is to usher in a higher form of intelligence. Defending humanity against its digital doppelgänger requires having a positive conception of what humanity is in the first place. As the pope writes in his encyclical, “Technological progress—valuable in itself—requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues.” He warns against a technoculture that displaces its burdens “on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.” Christianity has a clear “anthropological vision,” asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures.
Many secular thinkers can struggle to articulate a clear definition of what humanity is. As Trueman writes, “Can the term ‘dehumanized’ even have a meaning if human nature itself is an abstraction, an empty cipher?” In his recent book Language Machines, the NYU professor and tech writer Leif Weatherby writes that contemporary critics tend to assert what he calls “remainder humanism,” whereby “the human here is defined by technology’s creep, but only negatively.” In other words, the definition of
humanis implicitly reduced to the narrowing set of behaviors, traits, and capacities that machines do not yet possess—which leaves secular humanists defending the shrinking ground that is left.
What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.
I am not arguing that one must be or become more religious to fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI—that would make me, a not especially observant Presbyterian, a hypocrite. But I do think that one must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment. Otherwise, appreciating what large language models and their peddlers wish to take from us becomes too difficult. If secularists flinch at calling this taking—what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition”—a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it.
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