Way forward on AI will take more listening

Cardinal Michael Czerny once said the three things at the core of developing synodality are “you have to listen, you have to listen and you have to listen.”

The Czech-born Canadian Jesuit revealed during a Sept. 20 webinar on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas that he has further developed this doctrine.

“When you get tired of listening, then you listen some more,” said the 80-year-old who concluded his four-year term as prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development on Sept. 1. “You have to keep going. You have to get past the tiredness.”

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It is fair to surmise Czerny is approaching his current assignment as president of the Inter-Dicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence with this tireless curiosity and willingness to listen, as there is a lot to learn.

He admitted during this Q&A webinar, established by Concerned Lay Catholics in tribute to their retiring founding chair Gary Warner, that “as soon as you say AI, some of us start failing out fairly soon because we don't get it. I'm one of them.”

Czerny suggested during his extended interview with Sebastian Gomes, the executive editor of audio and video for the U.S. Jesuit-led America Magazine, that it could be helpful to contemplate the large, existential questions about AI by first using a “smaller, more proportional example like the cellphone.”

When asked by Gomes to define a “healthy user experience” with AI, Czerny replied that the “series of tough questions” one must ask to arrive at an answer could first be applied to the smartphone “just to see what those questions look like and how poor our answers might be.”

He suggested that tackling the problems of awareness, shared responsibility and addiction associated with these platforms is difficult “as the senses and the muscles that we need to be aware of AI are the same ones or similar ones to the ones that we would need for our cell phone. And as those are rather unexercised in many cases, if not most cases, we have a ways to go.”

To achieve a higher form of awareness and responsibility about AI, Czerny recommended we take time to talk and listen to each other “humanly and horizontally.”

He lamented that “we’re gullible and swallowing it,” alluding to the seductive addictiveness of television and cell phones as each emerged and gained popularity. He would very much like to see humanity resist having all their meaningful time devoured by AI.

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While Czerny administered this caution, he pointed out how Magnifica Humanitas contains statements about how AI is a “magnificent creation” and is “a sign of what humanity is capable of.” He declared, “it's not just the work of the devil, it's actually extraordinary and breathtaking and awesome.”

Pope Leo specifically expressed in the encyclical that “technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.” He called for it to be deployed in a way that “rebuilds the wall of fraternal coexistence,” restoring Jerusalem, rather than constructing a new Tower of Babel.

Czerny considers AI’s ambiguity as “a healthy sign of Catholic social teaching,” because there are no “cut and dried labels that you just apply to things and run away.” Instead, it is a process of “finding our way forward and we need to do it together.”

Both Czerny and his interviewer Gomes acknowledged multiple times throughout the call that Magnifica Humanitas is much more than an AI encyclical. They both alluded to how it theologically and philosophically explores humanity itself.

In that spirit, Gomes did ask Czerny to provide advice to Canadians on how to live Magnifica Humanitas amid enduring domestic challenges that include “questions of affordability, pressures on our health-care system, communities feeling polarization, (ongoing) reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada, environmental degradation.” The journalist also alluded to the unfolding trade war between Canada and the U.S.

Czerny avoided offering any political commentary, but he advised the nearly 200 people attending the webinar to favour the “bottom-up reading of things” taking place in society “as opposed to the top-down one.” This approach, he said, “sustains hope” because of its realism.

“Those are the headlines, those are the trends, those are the concerns, but what does that look like closer to where I am? (Don’t) just spend all my time in my head, which is to say on social media. Maybe start by finding a community that's struggling with the same questions and then start together,” counselled Czerny.

The formal part of the program concluded with Gomes alluding to the recent discourse from Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the need to pace artificial intelligence development.

Gomes noted how the Pope in Magnifica Humanitas wrote in paragraph 106 that “calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family.”

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How did Czerny respond to this observation?

“Thanks be to God,” he exclaimed.

(Amundson is an associate editor and writer for The Catholic Register.)