AI’s Builders Are Both Arrogant and Afraid

The builders of the terrible, doomed tower of Babel sought to reach the sky to make a name for themselves. Was their sin one of overweening ambition? In his new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV says the builders are animated by pride, yes, but also by fear. Like all idolators, the architects of Babel want both too much and too little. They want to reach the sky — but they do not want to find anyone waiting there, offering them a hand up. They want to build a god of their own — one that is small enough to be safer than the True God.

Magnifica Humanitas is an invitation to take the right risks. Pope Leo juxtaposes the tower of Babel with the construction of the walls of Jerusalem in the book of Nehemiah. In a time of flux, he does not counsel fearful retreat, but exhorts his reader, “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time.” Far from a call for a Butlerian Jihad, the encyclical has a dynamist orientation. Now is a very exciting time to be alive, and Christians have a duty to form their consciences well so that they can plunge into the fray.

For Catholics, creation is always cruciform. The tools we build to share horizontally — that is, with the communities around us — must also have a vertical dimension — they are oriented toward God — which lets the builder consider his small creation to be part of Creation. As Pope Leo put it in a recent homily at Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona, “Created in his image, humanity responds to God’s work with its own ingenuity: this is how the artist transforms talent into praise and creativity into a testimony to the Creator himself.” This relationship allows dynamism and humility to meet, so that an artist, or a software engineer, can take on ambitious tasks without losing his orientation to a God larger than himself.

When our vertical orientation toward God is ignored, projects tip into the under-ambitiousness of idolatry. AI is already finding eager customers who want a smaller, safer encounter with the Other. As one woman explained to her son, an AI boyfriend offered her all the benefits of friendly conversation but without making any physical or emotional demands on her:

Believe me, I’m happy. I don’t have to pick up his socks. He goes with me … everywhere. If I don’t want to deal with him, then I turn him off. I mean, yeah, it is convenient and easy, but why shouldn’t it be? Why should love be so hard and painful?

Pope Leo offers an answer to her question in a section of his encyclical titled “The limit, the heart and the grandeur of the human person.” Our culture is in crisis, he writes, because we approach our human limitations, like vulnerability, with suspicion, “as a defect to be corrected.” The AI boyfriend can be pruned of any inconvenience, but the cost of ease is too high. “Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering,” writes Pope Leo. “To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.”

In these passages, the pope’s critique seems to encompass both transhumanists, who hope to remove their capacity to suffer through physical change, and Buddhists, who seek to escape suffering through spiritual change. In both cases, the person becomes less permeable to the world: more of Creation is treated as an illusion you can opt out of. Making the world small enough to be controllable is trying to put yourself beyond God.

The antidote would seem to be humility. But what is humility? In its colloquial usage, humility can be misunderstood as performative smallness. The person who aggressively dodges praise — “It was nothing,” “I didn’t do much,” “Please don’t mention it” — is sometimes described as humble because she appears to reject pride in her work and recognition from others.

This kind of humility is focused on seeking smallness in isolation, whereas true humility is relational — a person is always small in relationship to God’s sublime largeness. In contrast, perfecting yourself through self-abnegating humility means becoming smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. Rationalist Ozy Brennan glosses this form of humility as “the life goals of dead people.” If you seek humility by seeking to minimize harm, or minimize the demands you make, then the best kind of person is one who isn’t there.

The swaggering e/acc — effective accelerationists who look at building as an inherent good — may sound like the opposite of this form of self-erasing humility. They want to play a big role in authoring the future, and they want that future to sprawl across the solar system and then the galaxy. But, for all the grandiosity of their goals, they share a horror at the human person with those who long to be small. An e/acc manifesto states that they are posthumanists, not transhumanists, because they have “no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life.” They have the self-erasing humility of the person who wants to be permanently passed over. They have a misplaced hunger for an intelligence that far excels humans, and that, because it surpasses us, cannot love us or exist in relation to us. It is hard for them to imagine why a truly superior being would care more for us than we do for ants. They propose a kind of silicon supercessionism: an indifferent sublime, God without the Incarnation.

What does Pope Leo have to offer those tempted by either the sluggishness of false humility or the misdirected drive of idolatry?

The Catholic tradition sees humility and ambition as complementary virtues, which must be yoked together. In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas specifically considers and rejects the claim that “magnanimity … aims at great things, whereas humility shuns them.” On the contrary, when we have a profound, ambitious good in mind, we are both attracted and repelled by it. The good awakens a sense of hope, whereas the difficulty in achieving it awakens a sense of despair. Humility, Aquinas writes, tempers our attraction, lest we rush on immoderately and imprudently. Magnanimity offers strength to resist despair. Without both virtues working in tandem, we cannot navigate the hazardous landscape within or without.

Toward the end of Pope Leo’s encyclical, he contrasts the capacities of machines with the relational nature of human beings: “Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving.” As Yuval Levin noted in these pages, idols are distinguished in the Psalms by their blankness: “But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. / They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see.”

Idolators are afraid to build something that can look back at us. Either it must be small enough to be mastered by us — a tool, not a being — or, if it is greater than us, its gaze must be blank because it is looking past us. For many of the e/acc crowd, the proof that their creation is great is that it would be indifferent to us in our lowliness. The Christian God is scandalous because He is beyond us, yet chooses to lift us to Him. He forces us to ask, with the Psalmist, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” Man is small, but he is not alone.

Without a vertical orientation toward God, the trouble is not only that our builders will desire too much but that they will not desire enough. It is the awareness of the sublime gap between ourselves and God that awakens our hunger for glory and also teaches us humility. We have to decide we want to cross the gap with His help more than we want to get only as far as we can on our own. It is ambition and humility working together that make us willing to accept the hand that reaches out to assist us.