Sister Helen Alford, an English Dominican nun who is the President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said that the development of artificial intelligence must always keep human beings at its centre, as all technology should.
Speaking on our Catholic News podcast channel, she said that Catholic social teaching warned that we must be wary of “adversarial technology”:
“The situation we have with AI is just a continuation of the situation we’ve had with technology, at least since the Industrial Revolution, because what came to the fore there was a type of technological development which is what we could call technocentric.
“It’s a kind which another thinker in this field has called adversarial technology. If you look at the way it has been developed, it takes the skills out of people’s jobs, and can take jobs away from people.
“And now with AI, it even seems to be taking the human person out of governance of things, or even the intellectual side of things. Technological development doesn’t have to be like that.”
According to Sister Alford, technology is capable of being something that enriches human life, rather than something that diminishes it – and we can choose which way we want it to go.
She said:
“We can also formulate a way of thinking about technological development which is what we could call human-centred, that enhances human skill and could actually make human jobs more interesting, more rich, more full, more human. Technology can be devised in more than one way.
“The big tech entrepreneurs, who are making huge amounts of money out of this existing way of producing technology, will say what I’m saying is against technological development, but it’s not, it’s another kind of development.
“We should be in favour of technological development because that’s about creating a more rich life, using our creativity to make it possible for human beings to do more things. The trouble with the way AI is being developed is that it’s not being developed that way.”
The solution is to create a sense ‘solidarity’ so that people work together to create technology that serves humans:
“One thing we always need to do is put the human person at the centre. That’s the main message we get from Catholic social teaching. We can put the human person at the centre with technological development as well – including AI development.
“But we need to deal with the negative sides of technological developments. So dealing with the negative forms of AI, we need to really awaken solidarity. We have, for instance, lots of ethical frameworks that have been developed.
“The EU has developed them, UNESCO’s developed them. There’s lots and lots of them. It’s not like we don’t have the tools for doing it. We have to make sure it happens, and that’s where the solidarity comes in.”
Sister Alford said she was in favour of pausing development of AI, arguing we needed more time to consider its implications:
“We need people, society as a whole, to understand much more about it. And that takes time – to be actively engaged in dealing with it. So I think, insofar as a pause could be used for that, I think it would be a very good thing. Absolutely.
“Because one of the things we know from all kinds of systems, for instance, it’s quite old, this idea of a human-centred economy. There were people in the middle the 20th century trying to develop this. One of the things they always said is that in a human-centred economy, growth, isn’t an end in itself.
“We need growth which works with the human being. So it’s a sort of organic kind of growth, it’s a growth that works with organic systems.”
To hear more from Sister Alford, listen to our 50-minute Catholic News podcast:
Sister Helen Alford, O.P. © Facoltà di Scienze Sociali, Pontifical University of St Thomas (Angelicum). Used with permission.
