“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” So went the prohibition on artificial intelligence in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel “Dune,” and what was then a datum of fictional world-building is now a real and pressing concern. In the age when the passing of the Turing test was a distant prospect, the question of computing and the mind was one of anthropomorphism—of transmitting human qualities to an object. The issue is now arguably anthropic—of the objects’ becoming human. We have moved from the likeness of thought, expressed through artificiality, to the plausible existence of the real thing, artificially achieved. The leap from form to substance is profound and its consequences unknown.
This is the context in which Pope Leo XIV raised the challenge of AI in an Oct. 29 address at the Vatican. Speaking on the 60th anniversary of “Nostra Aetate,” Pope Paul VI’s declaration of the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions, Leo pivoted from an exposition on the document’s injunction against antisemitism to a warning on the threat of AI. “If conceived as an alternative to humans,” the pontiff said, the technology “can gravely violate their infinite dignity and neutralize their fundamental responsibilities.”
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