“Leon XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica humanitas” is not technophobic”

You have just discovered Magnificent Humanity, the encyclical of Leo XIV. What did you think of it?

This text is not technophobic but pleads for the insertion of technology into our lives by emphasizing “what we cannot lose”. It must be at the service of humanity. This is the opposite of the “techno-optimism” sold by digital giants, who claim to solve all problems with technology if we let them. I am curious to see how the text will be received by these circles. For me, it is in the right place of what is expected of the Church.

Without having participated directly in its development, you were invited to the Vatican for a conference of reflection last December. What memory do you keep of it?

This conference was entitled “AI and the care of our common home”. We were around forty researchers, scientists, philosophers from many countries. I remember some fascinating exchanges, but also these few words spoken by the Pope in his introductory speech: “AI can do nothing for hope. »

How do you understand this sentence?

The tools that multiply are means. They can tremendously increase our power, entertain us and distract us from our daily problems or anxieties. But for what? What good is power without meaning? The question of endings always catches up with us.

It is this question that fascinates you, much more than the technical aspect…

The technical aspects are important, of course, but they are not my subject. Nor do I place my reflection on the spiritual ground. I’m sort of halfway there. I try to understand and explain what is happening to us, to provide elements of discernment.

Generative artificial intelligences arrived in November 2022 with the first of them, ChatGPT. In less than four years, these machines that speak and interact with us have developed at dizzying speed and become essential for many of us, me first and foremost.

Yet in many ways there is something frightening about these technologies. Every day we discover an anecdote, a new usage or even a publication by Donald Trump that can disturb us. We feel, individually and collectively, that something is escaping us… Rather than keeping this feeling vague, let’s try to analyze it, think about the consequences and maintain control.

There are also a certain number of people who have never used AI… Are they naive to think that they will be able to continue doing without it?

When you are online with a voice server which asks you to press 1 or 2 to answer its questions, when you use a GPS which suggests a route or when a website offers you advertisements likely to interest you, you are already interacting, in a certain way, with machines.

If it’s not you who come to AI, it’s what will come to you, like the Internet came to all of us, even to those who said thirty years ago that they would never use it.

What is AI changing – or will it change – in our lives?

If we only talk about “conversational agents”, we can already see that a growing number of our fellow citizens are asking them for help to sort documents, write a letter, form an opinion on a subject, but also to maintain their friendly or intimate relationships.

Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon, said that AI would soon be like an “overlay”, a second skin between us and the world, which seems pretty accurate to me. For my part, I describe what happens with the word “nesting”, which can be understood in two ways. First, human-machine interweaving, that is to say an increasing number of areas where our actions will depend on our interaction with the machine.

Second, the overlap between the authentic and the synthetic. Images, speeches, logical reasoning are produced today by humans and machines. With social networks, the authentic – reality – has ceased to be a judge of the peace in the public space. You can lie or tell the truth, it doesn’t matter much. Reality does not disappear, but it ceases to be the keystone of our relationship with the world. It’s only just beginning.

Can this world that you announce be desirable?

I believe it is possible. Humanity has not said its last word. We must not be afraid, but we must above all look with lucidity at the change of era which is taking place before our eyes.

What is it?

Since the 15th^e century and the invention of printing, writing was the organizing principle of our relationship to knowledge, of our political relations, of our democratic and social life. Today this “Gutenberg era” ends. We must take note of this. This is an opportunity to remember that humanity lived and progressed before printing, with a different relationship to the world.

We can also say that if we had had to take stock of the Gutenbergian revolution thirty or forty years after its advent, we would have had, as we have today, a worried or gloomy dialogue. We would have deplored the profusion of libels and slanderous pamphlets. We would have witnessed the collapse of the clerical centers where knowledge was developed, without yet seeing others emerge.

We would have seen the emergence of civil wars and religious wars. However, four or five centuries later, the assessment of printing is written with luminous pages on the advances of science, human knowledge which has progressed at an unprecedented speed, the emergence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and, finally, of modern democracy. All this to say that major technological revolutions are not deterministic as such.

Should we then let it happen?

Certainly not, on the contrary! Letting it happen always means, in the end, letting the most powerful do their thing and favoring the law of the jungle. In the 1990s, the pioneers of the Web had a libertarian ideology. They didn’t want rules and promised the advent of a better world.

We clearly saw what this resulted in: very quickly, the network was centralized then privatized by a very small number of actors, who then acted not according to the general interest, but according to their immediate, real and obvious interest. We cannot blame economic actors for acting in their own interest.

But we may want to curb their appetite, with social and political forces that are there for that. If I wrote this book, it is precisely because it seems to me that, for the moment, we do not grasp this problem sufficiently to set limits, a framework, an order, so that this technological revolution takes place for the benefit of all humanity – and not of a few to the detriment of the immense majority.

Setting limits on a technology means, for some, hindering progress…

We cannot assume that, in the name of innovation, there are no rules to regulate the power of large companies that own AI. The first urgency would be to think about data governance. When you believe that a digital tool is free, there is actually, in the background, a huge market where everything you give of yourself is exchanged.

At the beginning, these data were about identity: “Who are you? » Then they became behavioral: “What do you like? »; relational: “Who is your friend? » Today, they become cognitive: “How do you think? What questions are you asking yourself? What are your moods? What are you afraid of? »

AI agents will become, like social networks, immense data vacuum cleaners. But what is the status of this data? Are they private goods that belong forever to the companies that collect them? Common goods, accessible to all of humanity?

Or public goods, under the usual control of the public authority? How do we govern these billions of billions of information? Is there a need for a constitution? The equivalent of a declaration of human rights? It may sound strange, but it is a major political issue for years to come.

Do you identify other areas in which a framework should be set?

Yes. Firstly that of responsibility. These machines are not simple neutral tools that humans have at their disposal completely at will. When a decision is made by someone following a dialogue with a machine which may have influenced them, their responsibility exists, but it is perhaps not absolute. What about those who configured the machine?

The second area is what I call a “sacralization of the brain”. Just as the body, in our political order, has gradually been considered inviolable, we should think about the cognitive manipulations to which our mind could be subject.

While being critical, you don’t seem so pessimistic…

We are rapidly adopting technology that is beyond our control. The final sentence does not seem realistic or effective to me. Let’s instead keep in mind that we are freer when we know how the tools work.

Why does AI often prove us right? Why does she flatter us? This is not due to the technology itself, but to the economic model behind it. And then let’s allow ourselves, as a family, in our personal lives, real moments of disconnection.

The main limitation of machines is that you can never not find something you are looking for, nor find something you are not looking for. This makes surprise and quest impossible, which are two essential aspects for human beings.