Technology can steer us into error and make our bad anthropology worse, but only after we’ve already tossed out the good map.

As Leo put it in Magnficas Humanitas, “The key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it.”

Listen closely to the folks in Silicon Valley hyping AI as a replacement for human labor. You can detect their unstated view of humans: They see us as computers.

And if we are mere computers, we are poor specimens. Compared to their large language models, which can “recall” anything ever written, we are ignorant and bad at math.

We are, of course, not computers. But again, we need to avoid blaming this error entirely on Silicon Valley. The tech industry has, to some extent, just inherited an older mistake. Modern man has, over the past few decades — without noting the shift — come to think of the human person as essentially an intellect. Our flesh and bones are seen as accidental baggage, even a curse.

Elites holding to this view of the person adopt (but don’t usually say aloud) the opinion that intelligence equals virtue. Far worse is the unstated premise that productivity equals value.     

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed,” Pope Leo warns, “it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.”

Rapid technological growth creates “a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce,” Leo writes.

Today’s elites, in and out of the tech world, really do seem to believe that a person is only as good as his measurable contributions to the world. This is almost tautological to the secular materialist mind.

I have had elite students tell me they couldn’t imagine starting a family because they owed it to the world not just to graduate from their Ivy League college, but also to go to law or business school and then gain material success. When I suggested that loving one’s spouse and raising a child might itself be worthwhile, they dismissed that as impossibly sentimental.

Again, here we can detect an unstated anthropology: The achievement-oriented, heavily-educated American or European sees herself primarily as an individual. Her interactions with others are not relations but transactions — fully consensual, limited, contingent.

Modern man sees himself as a free-floating, atomized bundle of rights. The Christian view upheld by Pope Leo is different: Man is fundamentally a relational creature, an embodied creature, a familial creature. Our bodies, our families, our relationships are not accidents or adornments on our true selves. They, as much as our intellects, make us who we are. What’s more, we exist in a place — a physical place. Who and what are physically around us shape our individual identity, even if we didn’t choose those things.

Our relationships with other people aren’t merely means to getting what we want. Relationships are good in themselves. This is lost on the modern mind, and so our policymakers try to make policies that make us less dependent on one another — as if dependence is a weakness. More profoundly, perhaps, our Big Tech masters of the universe make tools aimed at liberating us from interpersonal relationships.

Here, the threat from AI is obvious:

“The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking,” Leo writes. “Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE MYTH OF GREEN CHINA

Robert Nisbet last century defined the alienated individual as the person who “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.”

AI is merely a tool. But it’s a tool with which we can’t be trusted unless and until we fix our mistaken understanding of who we are.