Pope Leo, artificial intelligence and the desires technology will never satisfy

Overview:

Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

O God, you are my God whom I seek;
for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts
like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water (Ps 63:2).

Find today’s readings here.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord,” St. Augustine begins the most famous sentence he ever wrote, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Tom Regan, S.J., assigned the bishop of Hippo’s Confessions to me and the rest of the freshmen taking his “Introduction to the Philosophy of Being Human” and told us to reread the work roughly once every 10 years. It would say something new to us in each stage of our lives.

I am overdue for a rereading, but these words have never been far from my mind since I first encountered them. And I can’t help but think of the great influence they wield in a new way over the entire church through our first Augustinian pope.

Pope Leo’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is about many things, including artificial intelligence. But grounding the entire document is a pitch for a Christian understanding of what it means to be human. And fundamental to being human is to experience the desire that the psalmist speaks of with such vivid imagery in today’s readings (pining, thirsting; parched, lifeless and without water). But this capacity for desire is at great risk of being exploited.

Edward Bernays is widely considered the father of modern public relations. He also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays took his uncle’s theories about human desire and applied them to the emerging fields of consumer marketing. Adam Curtis, whose 2002 documentary “The Century of Self” tells this story, describes Bernays’s insight:

[Bernays] began to argue that the future of marketing, advertising and politics was to find ways of…

Source