Artificial intelligence and the digital systems on which it is based represent a total environment — the world, plain and simple — in which machines produce culture rather than human beings. The humanistic challenge lies in shaping a way of inhabiting this (digital) world, begetting culture through practices of love that enable each individual to sense corporeally their own dignity in the process of becoming and existing.
Pope Leo XIV situates the Catholic Church in the “digital transition,” affirming the Gospel principle of social justice as a confession of faith in the contemporary world. It is here that AI emerges as an organizing force of the world. AI is not a phenomenon in and of itself; it emerges from a long-standing global process of transformation—in the wake of the fascinating and disturbing power of “ever smaller,” as R. Feynman put it.
As an emerging force within an all-encompassing and pervasive process, AI cannot be considered merely a tool produced and used by us. Therefore, it is not dependent on our determinations of interest, purpose, and value orientation. As an organizing force emerging from the digitization of human life and the world, AI enhances the digital realm’s overall functionality.
Artificial Intelligence as Total Environment
AI and the digital system on which it rests cannot be considered mere technology because they have become the world itself—the world in which we live, inhabit, and are immersed from birth to death (for the time being). Being beyond technology, AI stands also beyond good and evil (Nietzsche), demanding more than ethics and knowledge to remain a “world phenomenon” of the human.
The digital realm, emerging as the organizing force of AI, heralds a rupture in the human-world relationship as we have known it until now—the relationship that began with Homo sapiens and that we might define as analogical. In this relationship, humanity has adapted the world to be habitable for humans, and sometimes even humanly habitable. We commonly refer to this practice as “culture and civilization.”
Defining humanity by its ability to position itself in the world and inhabit it by working on the world, culture and civilization express the unique dignity of human beings, who are placed by God in the world without any predetermined form. Pico della Mirandola believed that human beings were placed in the world this way because only through this indeterminate manner of inhabiting it can one grasp God’s passion and love in creating the world. Inhabiting the world through culture and civilization means loving the world as God loves it. This practical homology of love for the world represents the unique dignity of every human being.
This kind of analogical relationship to the world no longer exists in the digital age. In the contemporary era—that is, the digital realm as the world organized by the emerging power of AI—machines, with their algorithms and unfathomable, elusive black boxes, produce culture, giving rise to unpredictable and currently unmanageable autonomous developments.
However, this usurpation of culture and civilization from human hands is not a product of the digital-code world but the result of entirely human choices. These choices reveal our surrender of freedom in the face of the digital system’s libidinal allure. Entrusting the production of culture to machines is convenient, practical, fast, and economical. It relieves humans of the burden of determining how to inhabit the world themselves. Not the machines, but we human beings have chosen not to have indeterminate ways to inhabit the world, outsourcing ourselves from the world God desires us to love as He loves it— and ensuring so that machines will define us, becoming “our” way of inhabiting the world. However, this does not lead to the (potentially infinite) openness of indeterminacy that lies at the heart of human dignity. Rather, it leads to total determinism in a world we no longer inhabit.
Perhaps the argument that we humans have surrendered our role as creators of culture and civilization—that is, of the way we inhabit the world—to the organizing power of AI with the digitization of the world seems exaggerated. I will mention just two phenomena that suggest we may be heading down this path.
First, popular science narratives tend to present the digital system—and, within it, the emergence of AI’s organizing power—as the perfect analog of our brain system, or human intelligence. Maryanne Wolf’s studies on digital reading show that this is not exactly the case. The human brain does not exist elsewhere within the digital system but must learn to move and navigate within it. Once it has learned to do so, however, and the digital realm has become the brain’s total environment, and the brain no longer knows how to navigate systems other than the digital one. Nor is it motivated to do so because such systems are less libidinal satisfying and would require an investment of mental energy that serves no purpose. Thus, the digital system becomes the world, plain and simple. It is a world in which humans are relieved of the task of determining their own course because machines already take care of that. The digital-code world, organized by the emerging force of AI as the new exclusive agency of cultural production, relieves us of our human dignity—our being and how we inhabit the world.
Another example is the binary framing of social conflict. In the analogical relationship to the world, social conflict was the institutive force of humanity. Social conflict, which once involved a plurality of actors—us, them, and the others; those of today, yesterday, and tomorrow—has been replaced by a bipolar conflict that allows for neither mediation nor negotiation. In this conflict, politics can be nothing other than the total victory of one side over the other. It can no longer be a synthesis of us, them, and the others. This monistic social conflict is possible only within the code logic of the digital world, which occupies its inhabitants and transforms them into libidinal appendages of its all-pervasive power.
Faced with the emerging power of AI, which deploys the operational capacity of the digital realm to inhabit human beings, the question is not how we use or program it. Rather, the question is how human beings might create culture within this seemingly total digital environment.
The Civilization of Love
At the end of his encyclical, Pope Leo refers to the two biblical narratives mentioned at the beginning as images of possible ways of inhabiting the world. He writes: “If we examine global dynamics, we can recognize more clearly the spread of a culture of power characterized by polarization and violence. The modern Babel can be seen not only in the globalized technocratic paradigm but also in the clash between opposing imperialisms—between powers that wish to preserve their supremacy and those that wish to seize it—resulting in a multitude of local conflicts. Moreover, there seems to be no limit to the race—driven by a dehumanizing ambition—to develop ever more powerful technologies or to secure control over them. Yet, despite this downward spiral, we can also glimpse a significant portion of humanity striving to remain human, working to build a city of coexistence and peace. All too often, we are unwitting builders and clumsy architects of this city. We are capable of generous gestures, yet we lack an overall vision. This building project is slower, less visible, and less spectacular. It requires better understanding and greater coordination so that every community—from families to states—may take conscious and clear responsibility for it, as well as in relations between nations. We call this prospect of commitment, this construction site of hope, the civilization of love.” (MH 185)
This may seem like a romantic prospect—a beautiful ideal with no chance of giving rise to fully human cultural practices in the digital age. This is because we have reduced love to something indefinable, a private emotion of the individual that is often so different from that felt by the person we claim to love. Yet, in recent times, political philosophy itself has been deeply committed to restoring public recognition and social significance to love.
According to French jurist and philosopher Jean-Marc Ferry, love is the relational practice that enables another person to feel and appreciate their dignity as they are. Ferry observes that, in its formulations, the law is capable of universally affirming—in a normative but abstract manner—the human dignity of every person. However, the law cannot give concrete form to this dignity in the individual life situations—both personal and social—of human beings. The normative force of the law prevents it from being what it affirms in practice. It is in this shortcoming of modern law that the practices of love come into play, providing concrete, everyday gestures that kindle the experience of dignity in others.
In keeping with the social dimension of the Gospel, Pope Leo points to the collective practices of love undertaken by communities, states, institutions, and peoples as a dignified way to inhabit the digital world. Thus, human dignity is restored not only to the realm of practices, as European humanism conceived it, but also to the realm of feeling the intangible dignity of every man and woman’s existence in one’s own physical body. This may be the decisive point in inhabiting the world through cultural gestures and constructs.
The digitization of the world has revealed that culture cannot be a product because machines are more powerful, faster, and more precise than human beings. Therefore, we must begin to conceive of culture and civilization as a genuinely human way of inhabiting the world along different paths. The most promising path, in my opinion, is that of begetting: “Begetting is a labor that old and young undertake together, continuously creating themselves and one another in the process. The process of begetting and being begotten is possible only through the collaboration of overlapping generations. It is in this process that life endures. In this model, generations do not stack up like layers, each confined to its own slice of time, but are aligned longitudinally, winding around one another like the fibers in a rope. So long as new fibers are introduced as fast as old ones wear out, the rope of many fibers can keep winding indefinitely. So it is too with the life of many lives” (Tim Ingold).
Transitioning from producing to begetting culture and civilization could be the way to inhabit our small planet through practices of love that beget a corporeal sense of dignity in every individual. This is not only faith, but also politics.
