"It is Good that You Are" The Human Person in the Age of AI and The Digital Revolution

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"It is Good that You Are" The Human Person in the Age of AI and The Digital Revolution

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This is a talk I gave at an Acton Institute conference in Rome on the Human Person, AI, and the Digital Revolution in December 2025. The talk focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence and the digital revolution on the human person and and specifically how we understand ourselves. Photo Credit: Chat GPT — Prompt - MMM While there are many benefits to digital technology, artificial intelligence is amplifying many of the negatives impacts on how we understand the person. It has led to a mechanistic vision of the human person and reductive vision of reason, freedom, emotions and more. Some of the problems I address include: * Understanding ourselves through the computer * Digital Bureaucratization * Denigration of the Body * Commodification of Persons* Surveillance* Behavior Modification * Transhumanism — AI, CRISPR, and designer babiesI conclude with a response of philosophy of the person that is not filtered through computer analogies, but grounded in the vision that being is good, matter is good, our bodies are good - not accidents - but constituent of who we are, and with richer concept of reason, intelligence, emotions, and our social nature, and with agency and grace. A key element of digital revolution is Claude Shannon’s work on information theory in which he discusses Noise and Signal: The Gospel and Christian vision of the person is the signal in the midst of so many distortions about the nature and destiny of the human person.Outline and ThemesThe Nature of the Digital Revolution* The Digital Revolution is not a single phenomenon; we are still in its early stages, and it is hard to predict what will happen.* It has produced:* Increases in productivity* Medicine* Education* New industries and faster, broader globalization* Mobile and satellite telephony, bypassing landlines, especially impactful in the developing world* De-materialization (“10 things to one phone”)* There are many positives but there are also trade-offs – “with the invention of the car, comes the car crash”Key DistinctionsDistinction 1: Technology vs. the Technological Society /The “Technological Paradigm” — Pope Francis)Technology is what human beings create. We are called to complete creation.Technological Paradigm is a Worldview* Whatever can be done is permissible* All problems are technical problemsMany dominant technology platforms are infused with secular, materialist, and transhumanist values, producing addictive products and harmful behaviors, often despite known negative effects.As noted in Pope Francis Encyclical Laudato Si’, technological power has not been matched by growth in responsibility, values, and conscience. (Guardini)Distinction 2: Critiquing technology ≠ rejecting technology or innovation, penicillin or hospitals; nuance is required. Technology is not neutral and shapes us for good or ill.Distinction 3: There are some who worry about apocalyptic scenarios – “If anyone builds it, everyone dies.” Others reject these outright. Since no one can successfully predict we can talk about positives and negatives without affirming either position.How AI and Digital Technology Shape our Self-UnderstandingDistortion of the Person (Starting with Consciousness)* AI exacerbates the problem of understanding ourselves through the analogy of our creation: we see ourselves through the machine.* This is not new: in the Industrial Revolution, mechanistic ways of understanding the person, the family, the economy, and society fueled the idea that everything could be planned and social engineered.* In many discussions of AI, the human person is approached beginning with consciousness—not reason, freedom, embodiment, social nature, or the image of God—so we interpret the person through the lens of the computer: man through machine.Contrast this to Catholic philosophy of the person which begins with the person as:* “an individual substance of a rational nature, created in the image of God,” with reason seeking the good, true, and beautiful; free will; embodied and “made out of the dust”; born into families and cultures—our bodies are not an accident of our personhood.* We are not simply consciousness driving around in a body; as St. Thomas Aquinas says: “I am not my soul.”* Only a small part of brain activity is actually conscious; yet AI discourse often equates consciousness with personhood and reduces reason to discursive ratio, ignoring intellectus.Reductionism in Thinking and “Intelligence”* Artificial Intelligence is a certain way of “thinking”: discursive and explicit, fast processing, but not thinking properly understood.* It resembles what Iain McGilchrist describes as a Left Hemisphere dominated approach: reductionist, explicit, mechanistic.Parallel between the ratio and the intellectus in Saint Thomas Aquinas – See for example Antiqua et NovaRelated to Benedict XVI Regensburg Address and the problem of limiting reason to the empirical.This can further ...

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