Artificial Intelligence & The Human Person
Handout for lecture at Acton Institute Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Human Dignity, and the Free Society. Pontifical Gregorian University Rome December 2025
Artificial Intelligence & The Human Person
Overview
Digital Revolution - we are in living within the Digital Revolution. Like Industrial Revolution it is difficult to predict what will happen – both negative and positive.
Like all technology there are trade-offs
This talk is broad and thematic. I will focus the actual (and potential)negative impacts of the digital revolution and AI
Brief Caveats and Distinctions
1. Technology vs. Technological Society / Technological Paradigm
a. See Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, Augusto Del Noce
2. A critique of technology / technological society does not equal anti-technology
3. Some worry that AI will lead to Apocalypse – maybe -maybe not – this is far above my paygrade – but Because NOT Apocalypse does not mean there is nothing to worry about
AI & The Human Person
Potential benefits in many areas: productivity, research medical diagnosis, education, access for poor excluded.
Focus of this talk is on actual and potential negatives impact on human person.
DISTORTION OF THE PERSON
1. Seeing the Man Through the Machine: Starting with Consciousness
Consciousness is an element of who we are, but the human person is much more than a conscious being. This starting point gives too little to the person – it interprets the person through the lens of the computer-it tries to understand the person through the lens our creation –man through machine.
What Catholic anthropology begins with the person as an individual substance of a rational nature so we are created in the image of God, with reason that seeks the good, true, and beautiful a will with freedom, made out of the dust Of the earth - we are embodied persons with a social nature born into families born into cultures embodied and embedded -- our bodies are not an accident of our personhood.
This does not deny consciousness, John Paul II speaks about it – he also speaks about interiority, yet we are not simply consciousness driving around in a body like we drive in a car.
Don’t limit person to consciousness
2. Reductionism in Thinking and Intelligence
Related to what Iain McGilchrist describe as Left Hemisphere dominated way of thinking.
Left and right hemispheres attend to the world very differently the left hemisphere as a mechanistic technical detailed way of seeing the world whereas the right hemisphere attends to the big picture to the explicit to meaning.
Parallel between the ratio and the intellectus in Saint Thomas Aquinas – See for example Antiqua et Nova
One concern: with AI is more reflective of left hemisphere thinking this will further solidify this type of approach to the world.
Related to Benedict XVI Regensburg Address and the problem of limiting reason to the empirical.
McGilchrist: The Master and His Emissary
· The master sees the big picture – emissary sees only part. Will AI be the emissary who leads the master instead of the master leading the emissary?
Digital Bureaucratization of Bureaucracy
· Benefits to Standardization
· Potentially abdicating our decision making to algorithms
· A bureaucratic rigidity could create injustice and undermine rule of law which is grounded not only in rules, but in the virtues of prudence, temperance, and justice.
Denigration of the Body
· These are pre-existing problems of the technological paradigm and recurring theme in history Gnosticism.
· Reductionist view of the person
· The body is seen as accidental to the person
· This has profound impact on relationships, self-understanding, sexuality, marriage, children,
Amplification of the Technological Paradigm
· Efficiency highest goal
· Primacy of the Technical
o Technical solution to all problems
o If technically possible then we can should do it
· Commodification of Persons
· Everything an Object of Trade (See Del Noce)
PART 1 B – AMPLIFY CURRENT PROBLEMS
There is a lot of worry about alignment -- we already have aspects of the digital revolution that are not aligned with human flourishing and are harming ourselves, our politics, our economies, and our relationships. AI will amplify that mis-alignment
Loss of Privacy, Surveillance, and Social Credit
· We already have serious problems with loss of privacy, surveillance by states, and what Shosana Zubuf has called “surveillance capitalism.”
· Free services resulted in widespread data collection and intrusion into our private lives.
· The recent developments in AI only exacerbate this problem.
· Political, Social, Economic, and Personal Threat
· Personal Privacy matters because it reflects who we are as persons. We are personal subjects with a social nature. The most personal of those relationships are private and should not be open to data collection. But Big Tech, because of its materialist, instrumental view of the world cannot see any intrinsic value in these non-utilitarian, intimate, personal relationships. It’s only data that can be used.
Behavior Modification
One of the most dangerous aspects of this is behavior modification. And your personal information is sold and used to craft specific, targeted ads, social media posts, and videos to influence us.
“We’re being tracked and measured constantly and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now.”[i]
We still have freedom or agency, but it does mean that we are being influenced in ways we do not understand and by processes of which we are unaware.
Commodification of Persons
· Persons are cogs for state or business
· Everything becomes and object of trade
RELATIONSHIPS
· Loneliness, meaningless, and anxiety are at epidemic highs as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge and others have documented.
· Increasing numbers of young people especially in relationships with AI chat-bot
· Undermine embodied, face to face relationships will only exacerbate loneliness.
Transhumanism
· Underlying much of AI development is transhumanism
· The idea of Combination of Biology and Technology
“If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like …Only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world.”
David Pearce- Humanity+
Genetic Engineering an AI
An immediate worry is the combination of AI and Genetic Engineering – Combination of CRISPR with LLM and incredible computing power is a real threat. As Bill Drexel writes in the New Atlantis
AI is to “genetics what calculus was to physics, providing the tools necessary to harness the full power of biology and making earlier efforts appear primitive by comparison.
Designer Babies is not something in the future.
· This has social, anthropological, and theological impact
· It creates great confusion about God, creation, and who we are.
Responses
Innovations in Commerce and Technology
• Rule of law
• Build digital technology that servse the person and family and church
• Build commerce that serves families and communities
• Build de—centralized technology
• Digital subsidiarity
Ultimately, we are in an anthropological struggle –what does it mean to be a human person? And a debate about metaphysics and eschatology.
For this there is no technical solution. The solution to the crisis of our times is not found in the technical world.
Key Response: We must escape the technological paradigm and present the gospel of Jesus Christ the good news about the human person.
· We are embodied, embedded persons endowed with freedom and reason – with a social nature directed to deep loving relationships.
· Technology cannot be a substitute for in-person relationships with other people in families in friendship in religious communities.
· Ultimately at the highest level in the church, the Ecclesia in Divine liturgy and worship where we commune with our creator it is only here that the goodness and unique and unrepeatability of the person is affirmed.
BRIEF READING LIST
John Paul II: Redemptor Hominis Benedict XVI – all encyclicals especially Deus Caritas Est, Spe Salvi, Regensburg Address
Joseph Ratzinger - Values in a Time of Upheaval, Joseph Ratzinger in Communio – Anthropology and Culture
Pope Francis especially on the Technocratic Paradigm
Pope Leo homilies and messages on AI
Antiqua et Nova - Note on the Relationship BetweenArtificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith / Dicastery for Culture and Education
Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, The Problem of Atheism, The Age of Secularization
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and its Emissary, The Matter with Things, Ways of Attending
Jaron Lanier: 10 Arguments to Delete your Social Media Right Now
§ C.S. Lewis
o The Abolition of Man (Short)
o Mere Christianity (Medium Length)
o “The Poison of Subjectivism” (Essay)
o The Four Loves
o Space Trilogy
o Till We Have Faces
Bill Drexel: “The AI Genetics Revolution is Coming”
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-ai-genetics-revolution-is-coming
§ Dietrich von Hildebrand
o The Heart
o Nature of Love
§ Robert Spaemann
o Love and the Dignity of Human Life (Short)