There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI

For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.[Read: The Pope doubles down on the beautiful struggle]The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have mo