AI May Encourage Sin
By: Christopher M. Reilly
The following post includes edited portions of the copyrighted book AI and Sin: How Today’s Technology Motivates Evil.
It would take a great deal of mental effort to ignore the flood of news about artificial intelligence technology (AI) in recent years. Few technological developments in history have generated such a level of popular excitement, imagination, and also fear. Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist and author, has eagerly claimed that “we are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.” On the other hand, the sense of an impending, world-changing consequence is why sixteen leaders of world religions gathered in 2024 in Hiroshima, the site of a nuclear bomb explosion that ended World War II, to sign the Catholic Church’s document named The Rome Call for AI Ethics.
We can be open to new technologies while critically evaluating their impact on us. As Pope Francis said about the development of AI:
Human beings are, by definition, mortal; by proposing to overcome every limit through technology, in an obsessive desire to control everything, we risk losing control over ourselves; in the quest for an absolute freedom, we risk falling into the spiral of a “technological dictatorship.”Francis, Message of the Holy Father for the 57th World Day of Peace on January 1, 2024 (December 14, 2023), 4