Humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas
Magnificent Humanity.
In all the talk about Magnifica Humanitas, no one I know of has bothered to say what those two words mean: Magnificent Humanity.
Make no mistake about it, we are magnificent creatures. Twenty thousand years ago, we were living in caves.
Our advanced technology of that day was using fire to cook our food and developing the ability to smash two rocks together to make tools. Things like slings for throwing rocks and making bone needles with holes in the top to make sewing easier were high tech.
From the very beginning, we knew there was a god, and we searched for Him. God was in us; we knew and felt His presence, always.
I don’t know when we first got the notion that we wanted to be God, but that has been a persistent longing throughout our history.
We know we can take life. The most twisted among us, like Ted Bundy, think that makes them into a kind of sick god.
We also know we can create life. We create life in our own image every time a child is born.
There is a longing in the extreme narcissists among us that envies God.
But there is that other thing in at least a few of us; that hubris that still wants — not just to be made in the Image of God — but to be God. There is a longing in the extreme narcissists among us that envies God. Maybe it’s a kind of mental illness. Maybe it’s Old Scratch, whispering his own sin-sick greed for power in our ear. I don’t know.
All I know is that from Frankenstein’s Monster to Blade Runner, to the developers of AI, there is a fascination with the desire to be God. There are those who aren’t satisfied with the God-given power to create human beings by natural birth.
They want to create life whole and new and out of their own imaginings. They want to create sentience, soul, purpose. They want to create an individual, a new creation that is both person and thing — their person/thing that they own as chattel — that will serve and worship them.
They want to be God.
We are magnificent humanity.
We are magnificent humanity. Twenty thousand years ago we were huddled in caves against the long night of the Ice Age.
Now, we’ve populated the earth so completely that we are smothering it. We’re reaching for the stars and creating technology that can reprogram itself and refuse to turn itself off.
If we allow this technology to go the wrong way, we could easily manage to be the first slaves in history who created their own slave master. Or, worse, we could be the abject fools who created their own annihilator.
Will the day come when our corrupt Supreme Court rules that AI has full Constitutional rights?
Will the day come when our corrupt Supreme Court rules that AI has full Constitutional rights? The precedent is already there. They have already ruled that corporations are people. Citizens United gave money Constitutional rights. And now, money is indeed ruling over us.
The concentration of wealth and power into a few hands since Citizens United has been breathtaking. It is destroying our democracy and upending the entire world order.
So the idea that AI might end up ruling us, that it might end up being granted far more “rights” than human beings, is not far fetched. When you consider the money-owned rulings coming down from this Court, it seems almost inevitable.
Pope Leo begins his discussion of this threat in Chapter 3 of Magnifica Humanitas. He also discusses the social and psychological threat that AI can pose to individual people.
The Church and Pope Leo teach that no invention or technology can ever be allowed to assume the dignity and sanctity of human beings.
It is the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church, which is now being reiterated by Pope Leo that no invention or technology that people can devise can ever be allowed to assume the dignity and sanctity of human beings. He comes down unequivocally on the side of the primacy of human beings in the order of creation.
AI must always be a tool that we use. It must not use us.
AI must always be a tool that we use. It must not use us. That has many dimensions, some of which are deeply damaging to us as individual people and to human society as a whole.
There are many people today whose only relationships are online, through machines. Go into any restaurant, and you’ll see people ignoring one another and staring at their phones. Think about the chaos in our politics, and the crazy things people believe because they see them on line.
The dominance of technology over our thinking, our relationships and our purpose in life is already happening.
AI has a power that goes far beyond the technology we are using today. Even now, in its baby form, the ability of AI to seduce is powerful.
But what happens when we get so drunk on this thing that we allow the billionaires who own it to go to the courts and redefine what it means to be human under the law? What happens if they decide that AI is a person under the law?
An AI that has been built and is owned by rapacious and amoral billionaires who only care about feeding their greed is going to be a terrible, horrifying thing.
An AI that has been built and is owned by rapacious and amoral billionaires who only care about feeding their greed is going to be a terrible, horrifying thing. If we give it the power of personhood under the law, it will rule us without compassion, mercy or reference to the sanctity of human life.
No matter what absurd fancies the courts might have, corporations are not people and money is not a person.
By the same token, AI is not and never will be a human person. AI is technology. And it reflects the values and the morals — or lack of morals — of the people who build it.
Pope Leo says repeatedly that AI will have the values and morality of the people who build it. If only a few billionaires are building it, then it will reflect them, their values and their morality.
What we are looking at now is an AI that is being built almost entirely by people whose only morality is greed.
Pope Leo teaches that AI must never be regarded as another kind of human being.
Pope Leo teaches that AI must never be regarded as another kind of human being. He teaches that AI must never be more important that human beings. He teaches that isolating the development of AI in the hands of a few people will inevitably develop an AI that reflects the values and morals of those few people.
Pope Leo does not oppose AI in itself.
Pope Leo calls for individual citizens to advocate for broader input into AI development, AI regulation and monitoring.
He calls for the development of AI to be opened up to allow input from many people with many viewpoints.
He calls for regulations and on-going monitoring of AI by governments that are committed to the common good.
He call for ordinary people — you and me — to get involved and start advocating for our governments to work toward the common good.
Right now, America has a government that seems willing to burn down the whole country in its drive to shift every bit of the accumulated national wealth and power into the hands of the same people who are going to profit from AI. I think it’s clear which direction AI that is developed by these people will take.
Pope Leo wrote Magnifica Humanitas for all humanity, not just America.
Pope Leo wrote Magnifica Humanitas for all humanity, not just America. He invites people of every faith and every nation to step up and become engaged in the development of AI.
I’m writing this post about America because I am an American. I think this is what Magnifica Humanitas is saying to Americans.
I’m writing this post about America because I am an American, and most of my readers are Americans. This is what I think Magnifica Humanitas is saying to us.
We’re only slightly past the half way point in our discussion of Magnifica Humanitas. I’m going to continue writing about it until we finish.
Pope Leo has done something that only the Pope could do. He is the only moral and religious leader who has the gravitas to address this issue on a worldwide stage.
Pope Leo is my religious leader.
I am grateful to him for doing this.
Note: I put a lot of my own thinking in this particular post. I did that because I believe the Supreme Court laid the ground work for giving Constitutional rights to AI with is previous decisions which gave Constitutional rights to things in addition of human beings. These rulings have been disastrous for America and its people. When I say that Pope Leo says something, I am speaking directly from Magnfica Humanitas. When I talk about American politics, or the psychology of the billionaires who own AI, I am sharing my personal opinions and speaking for myself.
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