I am quite happy with the predictions I made back in December. Back then, Pope Leo’s encyclical on artificial intelligence had not yet appeared. I suggested that when it did, its main concern would not be whether machines can think, but whether human beings would gradually give up thinking for themselves. In particular, that we might start treating it as a substitute for conscience.
Now that Magnifica Humanitas has appeared, I think that I was pretty spot on. Pope Leo is asking what artificial intelligence does to the human person. That is the right thing to be thinking about: not whether a chatbot can be conscious, or whether the “singularity” will arrive before the next general election, or whether a sufficiently large pile of graphics cards will eventually replace the majority of white-collar workers. What happens to man if he delegates judgement, memory, attention, language and decision-making to systems that cannot love him, answer for him or suffer with him?
