The Vatican’s recent document on artificial intelligence, Antiqua et Nova – “The Old and the New” – is not a technical treatise, but a philosophical reminder: the rise of AI raises fundamental questions in new ways about the nature of intelligence and the kind of people we must become to responsibly wield powerful tools.
Pope Leo
You don’t have to be a religious person to recognize the problem. Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘Godfather of AI’, has warned that the risks have gone beyond science fiction and is increasingly concerned about AI’s ability to outperform humans in ways that are not in the best interests of humanity.
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However, speed is not insight. Pattern matching is not a judgment. AI is an astonishingly powerful tool, but it remains completely blind to the things that make us wise.
The core question is eternal: what is intelligence and how is it formed?
There is a difference between knowing information and being wise. Real knowledge is not the collection and synthesis of data; it is understanding what something is, understanding its essence; discern why it is so, understand its purpose; and cultivating practical wisdom (what Aristotle calls phronesis) to judge what is needed in real life situations.
By that standard, current AI is not intelligent in the human sense. It manipulates symbols with astonishing speed, but cannot grasp meaning, think about the good, or decide what is worth doing.
The real danger, then, is not that AI will become “sentient” and dominate us, but that we will deskill ourselves – producing generations adept at operating machines, yet deprived of proper judgment. As psychologist Jordan Peterson puts it, we must “get our act together” and become wise to our technological power before the destabilizing consequences overwhelm us.
The solution is not to reject AI altogether – as it can and will be used for a number of projects that will benefit us – but to revive the habits of mind and character that have been cultivated through serious education, and that are all too rare in today’s higher education marketplace.
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The fruits of what has become known as classical, liberal arts education are all the more important to consider today:
- Close reading of great, timeless texts trains the attention to understand nuances and context that no algorithm can provide;
- Logic and mathematics sharpen reasoning and expose misconceptions that chatbots present as ‘truth’;
- History, literature and philosophy expand the moral imagination and show that current technologies are neither inevitable nor unproblematic;
- Ethics and political philosophy force us to ask what constitutes a good life and a just society, moral judgments that machines simply cannot make.
These disciplines are needed more urgently than ever, precisely because our instruments are becoming increasingly powerful. The best engineers and policy makers will be those who have grappled with questions of both ends and means – who can’t just ask, “Can we build this?” but, “Should we?” And if it is to be built, how can it be done in such a way as to increase rather than decrease human wealth?
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Regulation is necessary; debates about AI in warfare, surveillance and education are already underway. Yet laws alone cannot produce citizens and leaders capable of scrutinizing these systems and insisting that technology remain a servant, not a master, of human development.
That is a cultural task. It starts in homes and schools that value truth and beauty above convenience, and in universities that refuse to outsource thinking to machines. In the age of AI, the societies that thrive will be those that still know how to build leaders who are able to say, when necessary, “We shouldn’t do that.” Wisdom, not computing power, will become the even scarcer resource that no machine can provide.
