Generative Artificial Intelligence & The Technocratic Paradigm

The 2024 CAPPF International Conference aims at considering benefits and problems connected to the fast and extensive evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, the Conference is devoted to analyze how the AI and in particular the recent evolution of Generative AI (AIGen) can (and should) be both developed and used for the wealth of persons and environment, moving beyond the so damaging and destructive technocratic paradigm, and promoting instead a fruitful interaction of natural systems with social systems within the integral ecology paradigm.

In 2015, with Laudato Sì (LS), Pope Francis launched a warning to the world on the urgent need of care for creation as a central moral obligation. His groundbreaking encyclical brings together the call to protect the environment and to defend the “least of these” through an integral ecology that challenges all of us to action. He moved from observing how the world, both the natural one and the human and social one, was seriously ill, and that the disease was so pervasive to put the very survival of humanity at risk. The Pope identified the root of the problem in the human behavior and particularly in an economic system incapable of functioning and, more precisely, in the connection between the technocratic paradigm and the spasmodic search for speculative profit, that is in the short or very short term (see LS, n. 109). The connection between the technocratic paradigm and the search for profit is then the origin of the throwaway culture: what is considered worthless is thrown away because it is no longer capable of producing profit, regardless of its intrinsic value as a creature or human being.

Eight years later, his Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum Pope Francis reaffirms with even greater force the fundamental messages of Laudato Sì and emphasizes the need for a profound revision of our life and business models, of the relationship between science, innovation, economy and society, of individual aspirations. Pope Francis must reluctantly recognize that the reaction to his heartfelt concerns for the care of our common home has been too timid and inconsistent: “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point” (LD, n.2). He once again criticizes the “technocratic paradigm”, which in these eight years has experienced “a new advancement”, based on an “ideology underlying an obsession: to increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal. Everything that exists ceases to be a gift for which we should be thankful, esteem and cherish, and instead becomes a slave, prey to any whim of the human mind and its capacities.” (LD, n. 22).

The point is not the rejection of technology but rather the use of technologies for the common good. From this perspective, the recent fast progress of artificial intelligence poses epochal challenges: “Artificial intelligence and recent technological developments are based on the idea of a limitless human being, whose capabilities and possibilities could be extended infinitely thanks to technology. Thus, the technocratic paradigm monstrously feeds on itself” (LD n. 21). And at no. 23 of the Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis has an expression of extraordinary incisiveness: “It gives shudders to realize that the capabilities expanded by technology give those who hold the knowledge and above all the economic power to exploit it an impressive dominion over the whole of the genre human and the entire world. Never has humanity had so much power over itself and nothing guarantees that it will use it well, especially if we consider the way in which it is using it” (LD, n. 23).

In the light of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, the International Conference therefore aims to analyze how GenAI should evolve and how it should be guided to avoid further exclusion of the most fragile people and further damage to planet earth, and it should instead be an instrument of integration between increasingly more interconnected worlds, avoiding growing inequalities.