In his posthumously published final book, The Rivers North of the Future, the social critic, philosopher, and renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich argued that humanity’s relation to technology had undergone a profound shift in the late twentieth century. In the era stretching from the late Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, technologies had been understood as tools subordinate to human intentions—as “something … that can be picked up or not picked up by a person.” But cybernetic technologies, Illich argued, were upending this relationship. “A hammer,” he said, “doesn’t make me into part of the hammer,” but when it comes to computer systems, the user “by the logic of the system, becomes part of the system.”
As a consequence of this shift, Illich went on to argue, humanity was “moving … into what I would call an a-mortal society.” For one, the body, as apprehended through the computerized systems deployed by the medical profession, was no longer perceived as mortal in any absolute sense, but as a bundle of signals and values to be registered, manipulated, and adjusted. Death could be reimagined as something akin to a computer crash. This outlook elided the fact that man was fallen and destined for death. In this regard, said Illich, “thinking about the body as a system is a way of hiding sin.”
Now the institution with which Illich maintained a complex lifelong relationship—the Catholic Church—has weighed in on the technological transition that interested him in his later years. In his heavily anticipated encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV has staked out a position for the Church in the battle over artificial intelligence and its social and political consequences. In an echo of Illich, Leo writes that today, “technology is not simply a tool” but instead has become “the standard by which everything is judged.”
“There is nothing accidental about this reversal of means and ends.”
There is nothing accidental about this reversal of means and ends. Cybernetic systems are designed to subordinate human users to machinic purposes, turning them into just one source of input. The AI industry has been deeply influenced by the prophets of the “Singularity,” who take this logic to its ultimate end. In the most radical variant of this outlook, humanity is reduced, in the immortal phrase of Elon Musk, to a “biological bootloader of digital superintelligence.” Likewise, in his youthful accelerationist phase, before he reversed course entirely, the AI guru Eliezer Yudkowsky declared the achievement of artificial superintelligence to be the “Interim Meaning of Life” and the “temporary definition of the Good.”
The new encyclical has been treated as an extension of the tradition of Catholic social teaching, which surely has renewed relevance at a moment when tech elites speak blithely of the looming emergence of a “permanent underclass” due to automation. But the document is just as importantly preoccupied with the account of human ends encoded in the newest technologies. The prophets of AI, as Leo seems to recognize, are driven by their own vision of the Good and of human transcendence that contests and competes with the one articulated by the Church.
“In the promises of transhumanism,” writes Leo, “we recognize a yearning that is of concern to us, namely the need for a fuller life, less exposed to limitations and suffering.” The pursuit of technological self-enhancement, in other words, speaks to the human impulses—a recognition of human frailty and a desire for transcendence—that also animate Christian believers.
But whereas “old and new ideologies alike urge humanity to overcome limitations through technology,” what the Church teaches is “the mystery of the Son of God entering into our human condition.” Inverting the transhumanist vision of mere mortals ascending to digital godhood, Christ “takes upon himself our weakness and transforms it into a setting for salvation.” Here, the debate replays earlier fights against heresy, notably that of St. Augustine (Leo’s theological lodestar) against Pelagius, who like today’s transhumanists saw human beings as perfectible.
Leo addresses himself “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill,” suggesting that nonbelievers might also find value in his message. Some probably will: Liberals otherwise wary of religion have lately found strategic value in the moral stature of the Church when it comes to, say, opposing Donald Trump’s military adventures.
But noncommittal endorsement of Magnifica Humanitas may allow secular AI skeptics to put off clarifying their own answers to the vital questions the encyclical addresses: What is the Good? What are the ultimate ends of humanity? Those pursuing the Singularity have their answers, as does the Church. In contrast, mainstream anti-AI thinking adds up to little beyond what Lionel Trilling (impugning midcentury conservatism) described as “irritable mental gestures”: data center NIMBYism, incessant parroting of the phrase “stochastic parrot,” vague worries about water, unemployment, and misinformation. The poverty of the liberal imagination when it comes to current technological debates is one of the most acute indicators of our postliberal condition.
Illich foresaw much of this when he suggested that the conflicts defining our time were fundamentally religious ones. “Modernity,” he argued, “can be studied as an extension of Church history.” The questions at stake in disputes over technology extended theological debates that could be traced back over a millennium; the crises afflicting liberal institutions were continuations of those that had also afflicted the Church. This is why, Illich said, “I do not believe this is a post-Christian world”; on the contrary, it is “the most obviously Christian epoch.” He didn’t find this reassuring, arguing that it meant we lived in “an apocalyptic world.” The broad resonance of Magnifica Humanitas suggests he was onto something.