Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 36 No 10
- Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
- Michael McGirr
- 01 June 2026
No one denies that AI is useful. The question is whether the same can be said of us. Perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that AI has been part of life, in the church and elsewhere, for centuries.
Without AI we would never have had the aisle, a handy invention still used for keeping families apart at weddings. The aisle means that feuds must wait until the reception. Hang on, without AI there could be no waiting anyway.
Without AI we wouldn’t have the letter aitch and therefore neither heaven nor hell could exist. We would have no hosts, no haloes and nothing holy. No Hail Marys.
Without AI there would have been neither air nor airway for the Lord to blow life into the human. We’d have been finished before we started.
Without AI there’d be no aims to include in our mission statements, those patsy substitutes for mission.
Without AI, there’d be no paint. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel would have been covered with velour wallpaper.
Nor would there be saints, that great stadium of barrackers for the rest of us still struggling on the field of life.
Without AI, none of us would be airworthy. We’d be stuck on earth forever with nothing to aid us and no aioli, Airedales or ailments of any kind.
Without AI there would be no aetiology to explain our ultimate purpose.
Nor could we ever tell our nearest and dearest as they gather around for our last rites that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Indeed, nothing could be said.
Have a look at Pope Leo’s new letter, Magnifica Humanitas. It is amply supplied with words such as faith, faithful, claim, remain, afraid, naïve, entails, affairs, sustain, against, daily, certainty and laid. It could simply not have been written without AI. Indeed, there has never, to my knowledge, been an encyclical written without the help of AI. The Bible itself is full of it. Without AI, St Paul could never have advised the Corinthians ‘not to live aimlessly as though they were boxing the air’.
AI has been around a long time. Ain’t no point denying it.
There are many ways in which this is true.
We have been programming people for ages. When I was a schoolteacher, students preparing for their Year 12 exams had endured some years of being taught to write robotic essays. An opening. Three paragraphs. A certain number of quotes from a text which may or may not have been read in its entirety, usually not. Topic sentences. Conclusions. A neat little package and there you have it. Those who strayed from the formula, let alone attempting anything original, were hauled into line. You can hardly complain that robots are replacing people when people have been so studiously turning themselves into robots anyway.
“There is a world of difference between mortality and obsolescence. We can cherish our limitations; they disclose our mystery to ourselves far more than our achievements.”
The same can be said of conversation, especially in the workplace, with its limited palette of acceptable words and phrases. Sometimes I wonder if Australian fiction has driven itself into the same shallow waters with its narrow ideological tastes. I have seen books described as ‘brave’ and ‘adventurous’ when they are just another stale rehash of the same stale opinions. I once congratulated Lorin Clarke on her beautiful memoir of her father, John Clarke, called Would That Be Funny? To me, it breaks one of the genuine taboos in Australian writing. It is the story of a happy childhood.
Many aspects of our life have become tightly scripted. Too few people truly inhabit their own words. Now they have machines to save them the bother.
This brings me to the widespread relief that has greeted the arrival last week of Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. He has found a voice that millions have been craving to hear, just as he has done in speaking about the godlessness of war. At one level, he is simply saying what many people are thinking. Artificial intelligence is fine if we are using it. It’s problematic if it is using us. He makes his arguments from basic principles which have been neglected since humanity got the taste for power and wealth, and that was a long time ago.
Magnifica Humanitas goes back over the history of modern Catholic social teaching since the release of Rerum Novarum in 1891 by the pope’s namesake, Leo XIII. In 1891, the pope was reacting to the invisible cost of the Industrial Revolution, namely huge profits for a small number of people at the expense of workers coping with appalling conditions. This is still a live issue. Go back and look at the photos of Jeff Bezos’ wedding in Venice last year. Ask yourself if you can remember the name of his bride. No, the entire focus was the man with the money. Now go and read about the conditions of workers at Amazon warehouses in the United States. Then think about the businesses impacted by Amazon and the isolation, for example, of readers who no longer get to discuss their reading with friendly staff in bookshops. Have a look at Chloe Zhao’s movie Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand. It explains a lot.
Leo XIII was worried that people were being turned into machines. Leo XIV is concerned that machines are being turned into people. These are two sides of the same coin called dehumanisation.
Magnifica Humanitas presents the church with a radical social agenda. It picks up some crucial phrases from Rerum Novarum. Leo XIII said, ‘The proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.’ (MH #3). Rerum Novarum ‘reminds us that there is no authentic evangelisation that does not also affect the structures of human society.’ (MH #30). Of course, there are Catholics who will duck and weave and hide in their pews and sacristies. But Leo is solidly endorsing the belief of Pope Francis that the church is not ultimately about the church.
Some parts of Magnifica Humanitas are already being widely quoted. Two phrases are among them: a call to ‘disarm AI’ and a description of the Just War Theory as ‘outdated’. Curiously, the most uplifting parts are not the parts about human magnificence at all. They are more the exquisite parts about human ineptitude and incompleteness. The habit we have of shitting in our own nests. Here are just two:
Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. The light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the “contingency” of the things of this world. (MH #118)
So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior, and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. (MH #99)
If you doubt that Pope Leo is speaking to the whole world, you will find reassurance in Anna Goldsworthy’s fine new Quarterly Essay, published on the first day of winter. It is called The God We Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence. Goldsworthy might be surprised to hear that she has been drinking from the same source as the pope, although she brings her experiences as both a creative professional (a concert pianist) and as a mother to her thinking.
She says, ‘Creativity flourishes under limitations’ and draws attention to the way AI is exacerbating global injustice, as if that weren’t bad enough already. AI tends to widen the gap between those on the top and the bottom of the ladder. The CEO of Starbucks earns 6666 times the wage of the average worker in the firm. A group of 60,000 people (0.001 per cent of the world’s population) own three times as much as the bottom 50%. And so on. In Australia, we are currently witnessing the ungodly spectacle of people arguing that their ambition and prosperity will be stifled if they cannot aspire to owning the houses that others pay to live in.
Goldsworthy writes in a similar vein to Pope Leo:
The first and last of all our problems is the body: this thing that aches and laughs and bleeds and experiences pleasure. It is the source of our vulnerability, and our delight. It is also our trump card, the one thing we have that AI does not: our only true property, 60 percent water, vulnerable to sharp objects, subject to time.
Goldsworthy’s father, the novelist, poet and doctor Peter Goldsworthy, has written beautifully in The Cancer Finishing School (2024) about the experience of living with impending death. You can’t help wondering if this is one of the things on her mind as she considers the unique nature of human being. We are mortal. We die.
Alan Turing (1912–1954) asked, before even the first computer was built, at what point destroying the machine would become the same as murder. We have always suspected that this was a question too far. The philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018) is among those who have said that keeping Turing’s imagined future at bay lies in a better understanding of what the word nature lends to the expression human nature. We have been too long transfixed by the word human.
There is a world of difference between mortality and obsolescence. We can cherish our limitations; they disclose our mystery to ourselves far more than our achievements. In the Pope’s worldview, we can only be creators because we first are creatures. Natural stupidity has as many uses as artificial intelligence.
Those of us who have played Scrabble since the dawn of time know that there is a three-toed sloth called an ai. Its main purpose in life has been to allow players stuck with a cramped board and too many vowels to get rid of a couple. It is a slow-moving creature, not known for its learning capacity.
It is curious that it should have given its name to the phenomenon sweeping the world. Or maybe not. Unless we are wise, AI will spare us the bother of having to think, having to know anything and having to choose our own words. We might all end up like three-toed sloths. But I don’t think we will. The reason is that there are many voices, Pope Leo’s significant among them, pointing in a humane direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment