I’ve always been a wannabe Luddite. Despite my dependence on—and sometimes addiction to—technology, I’ve never shaken my crunchy, techno-skeptic proclivities. I hate streaming music so much that I gave up my Spotify Premium account and opt to listen to AM/FM radio instead. When I can, I’ll spend up to an hour traveling to a local business to buy something rather than buy it with just a few clicks of a button on Amazon Prime. If I’m not cooking and choose to eat out, I’ll actually go to a restaurant to sit down and eat, as I’ve vowed to never order from Grubhub. I still call people on the phone. I make my students write their exams in blue books.
As you’ve probably guessed, I am deeply suspicious of AI. As much as I know it makes people’s lives easier—and that using it could relieve me of a variety of my time-consuming, burdensome daily tasks—I refuse to use it. I can’t fully suppress my instinct to say that there’s something sinister about it all, and my impulse is to think that it is emblematic of the beginning of the end. Yet, treating AI like a bogeyman is a cop-out. It’s too easy, dismissive, to completely write it off. Besides, AI isn’t going anywhere. Thus, doomers like me need to learn to deal with its existence, and to engage it more critically and comprehensively, considering the positive and negative factors that come along with it, as well as its broader practical and existential implications.
In the words of Pope Leo XIV, “the advent of artificial intelligence is accompanied by rapid and profound changes in society, which affects essential dimensions of the human person, such as critical thinking, discernment, learning and interpersonal relationships.” But rather than categorically condemning it for the threats it can potentially pose, we must ask how we can “ensure that the development of artificial intelligence truly serves the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few.” Most recently, the pontiff has explored AI’s wider anthropological and sociopolitical ramifications, in his encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas.
Taking up Pope Leo’s insights, I’d like to look more closely at AI as a tool primarily used for processing and disseminating information. Upon deeper reflection, one can recognize that the very real threats it poses are hardly new ones. They are the continuation—albeit intensified—of problems we were already faced with before the dawn of AI. AI is more a symptom of larger problems than the source of the sickness itself.
While it may not be apparent at first, there is a direct line connecting the invention of the telegraph to the dawn of AI and large language models (LLMs). Both are media that convey what Neil Postman labeled “context-free” information. Though his seminal 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business focused on the effects of television, Postman posits that it was the telegraph that jump-started the revolution in communication and information technologies. The “discontinuous” stream of information communicated through the telegraph introduced messages that had “no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each ‘headline’ stood alone as its own context.”
Whereas news coverage before the dawn of the telegraph once provided information that was both local and functional, “tied to the problems and decisions readers had to address in order to manage their personal and community affairs,” the “context-free” information the telegraph gave newspapers access to “need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.”
The dawn of context-free information—from the telegraph to AI—is emblematic of a broader shift of the locus of social and political agency from the concrete, immediate, local, and personal toward the abstract, distant, and impersonal. Over the last few decades, the exercise of power and dissemination of information have drifted increasingly into centralized models, concentrated into the hands of the few and distant. This is especially the case within mass media.
In 1983, roughly 90 percent of all media were controlled by 50 companies. By 2012, that number dropped to six companies. “Even local newspapers and television conglomerates,” the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi writes, “are increasingly being bought up by huge conglomerates…. These consolidations have led to a significant decline in coverage of local issues (and the issues locals care about) … [while] local and state news has largely been replaced with nationalized and centralized news, contributing to the ‘nationalization of politics.’” Hence, most people know who’s sitting in the White House, but few know who their local representatives are (or even who their neighbors are).
This shift from the immediate to the distant is fueled—and has been exacerbated—by the erosion not only of local media outlets, but also of avenues for engaging in direct action at the local level. Whereas people could once have a direct effect on their local circumstances—through block and neighborhood associations, civic organizations and parishes, labor unions, and local politics—these avenues to exercise agency are disappearing. Thus, the dynamic represented by AI is nothing new, and has been at work since way before its emergence.
Most people know who’s sitting in the White House, but few know who their local representatives are (or even who their neighbors are).
But without resorting to apocalyptic thinking or hysterics, why exactly is this shift so concerning? Taking our cues from our new pope, I’ll turn to the encyclical letter written by his namesake, Pope Leo XIII. This is particularly timely, given that Leo XIV has insisted on the importance of confronting the “new” challenges posed by AI using the framework with which Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum confronted a different set of “new things.”
In light of the great social and political upheaval brought on by rapid technological innovations during the Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo XIII felt the need to reemphasize the importance of properly ordering the relationship between larger and smaller bodies of power. His hope was to slow the pendulum between the extreme individualism of free-market capitalism and the extreme collectivism of communism somewhere in the middle, where the state took up its responsibility to preserve order and people’s dignity, while respecting and encouraging their capacity—and responsibility—to work as protagonists within their own society.
Though he didn’t explicitly use the term in his letter, Pope Leo XIII drew heavily on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which we see articulated as early as the 13th century in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s more politically focused theology. Forty years after Leo, Pope Pius XI articulated the principle of subsidiarity more explicitly in his follow-up to Rerum Novarum. “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community,” Pius wrote, “so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.”
Of course, it is only logical for larger entities like the national government to take charge of tasks that smaller ones like city governments or individual citizens are incapable of, like national defense. Yet the national government should not take charge of tasks that the local government is capable of. There are several reasons the Church teaches that it’s most prudent to keep things as basic—and close to home—as possible.
First off, it’s healthier for ordinary people to take responsibility for themselves. It affirms their God-given dignity, and makes them feel like they have agency. Teachers of students with helicopter parents understand how swooping in to do for someone what they can do for themselves ends up hurting them in the end.
Next, people and their needs are best understood on the most basic, immediate level. This is why it’s easier to take correction from someone who knows and loves you than from someone who doesn’t know—or who doesn’t care—about you. It’s also why I wouldn’t write a letter to the White House about a faulty traffic light on my block; they wouldn’t understand how it’s causing gridlock in my neighborhood the way my city’s mayor would.
Indeed, in Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV writes that “the principle of subsidiarity applies especially in the context of the digital revolution,” citing the “de facto” power—which often remains hidden from public view—of major economic and technological actors “over the conditions of everyday life.” Such power, “which monopolizes expertise, data and decision-making authority,” he continues, “involves companies and platforms that define conditions for access, rules of visibility, forms of interaction, and even economic opportunities.” Thus his insistence that “the principle of subsidiarity requires that such processes not be imposed from above … but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation.”
But perhaps one of the major reasons why the popes from Leo XIII to Leo XIV have placed great emphasis on this particular principle is their awareness that when the locus of power is too distant, too centralized and expansive, it is more prone to corruption. When power gets too big, too godlike, to the point that it begins absorbing the power of smaller entities and individuals, it becomes harder to keep it in check. This is especially the case in our age when power continues to be concentrated into the hands of corporations whose power reaches across the globe, which—despite not always being explicitly felt or seen—shapes world affairs and our own daily lives and way of perceiving reality. The fact that the elites who run global corporations are neither elected nor held accountable by a set of constituents makes it harder to regulate what Pier Paolo Pasolini once called “power without a face.”
More recently, Pope Francis warned of the spread of a technocratic paradigm of power in which privileged elites who claim to be “experts” make decisions allegedly in favor of making life better for ordinary people, granting us more freedom. Yet their “expertise” tends to measure “human development” more on the basis of “metric-driven” data than on the basis of the actual needs of particular people and communities. “By itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development.”
Too often, Francis continues, advancements in technology are made “without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings.” Their impersonal, abstract logic is incapable of recognizing and responding to real needs: “The specialization which belongs to technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture. The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole.”
This shift—of which AI is a major part—toward centralization and depersonalization, technocratic overreach and bureaucratic bloat, has led not only to the loss of agency and erosion of civic culture but also to an overall sensation of rootlessness, atomization, disenchantment. As Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth puts it, we’re living in what increasingly feels like “a machine,” one built to “rebel against nature: against reality itself.” This rebellion has opened the floodgates to “powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage.”
This paradigm shift is especially evident in the case of mass media and information technologies. Not only are the media conglomerates that eat up local news outlets amassing power on a structural and economic level, they also hold a power of an epistemological sort, the kind that shapes our perception of reality and of our very selves.
The inevitable result of “context-free” information, unmoored from the concrete and disseminated by distant entities in power, was the proliferation
of what Postman called “pseudo-contexts” and “pseudo-events” (borrowing the term from historian Daniel. J. Boorstin), taking place within structures “invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a
seeming use.” This is even more the case now than when Postman was writing four decades ago: thanks to social media—which today helps transmit AI-generated stories, images, and even videos—we are continuously bombarded with a series of images and symbols that feel uncannily bizarre, detached from reality, or, as French theorist Jean Baudrillard would put it, hyperreal.
According to his theory, the line demarcating reality from the representation of it has imploded, resulting in a state “more real than the real.” We are living, so he claims, in a simulated reality created by signs, images, and media narratives that have come to replace and redefine reality as it is. When Baudrillard claimed in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place, he knew full well that it did actually take place—and that people were killed or maimed, and homes destroyed, as a result. Rather, his provocation was meant to draw attention to the fact that, for those of us in the West experiencing the war through the mediation of a screen, it may as well have not taken place.
Ultimately, Postman feared that the proliferation of pseudo-events, while “endlessly entertaining,” engenders “a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything.” The “glut” of information has rendered “the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote,” leading to “diminished social and political potency.” The spread of mass media, disseminated by entities that are both removed from and indifferent to the concrete circumstances we’re faced with in day-to-day life, left us with “a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” In sum, this model of disseminating information strengthens power up top while diminishing it on the basic level.
This feeling of impotence is further entrenched by the fact that mass media companies capitalize on extremely divisive narratives that tell us to fear or even hate the “other side.” By buying into these simplistic, ideological “scripts” handed to us by mass media outlets, we bar ourselves from the possibility of collaborating with our so-called “enemies,” which only serves to weaken our agency and bolster that of those in power. The emergence of algorithms and AI-generated stories and images serves to further intensify the artificial narratives, events, and ideological boundaries that condition our perception and overall experience of reality and of each other.
But perhaps the most immediate threat posed by AI is the extent to which it weakens our capacity to carry out basic tasks—like thinking, writing, and communicating—on our own. As much as having AI write an email or a paper for you can make your life a little bit easier, it risks diminishing your ability to act within and influence your everyday life, thus exacerbating the looming feeling of impotence that plagues so many of us.
It wasn’t until I was 15 that I got on (and got addicted to) social media. It radically reshaped my thought processes, my way of perceiving reality, my relationships, and my identity. But because I had a life pre–social media as a point of reference, it wasn’t that difficult for me to recognize how much it was hurting me, and to slowly wean myself off it and restore my relationship with reality. Needless to say, it is more difficult for those who grew up watching TikTok videos from their early childhood to take a break from it, let alone to recognize the effects it’s having. One can draw a similar parallel to AI usage.
For those of us who grew up before the dawn of AI, who learned to write and think on our own, without outsourcing the effort to other people (or machines), it’s easier to use AI prudently—without relying on it as a crutch, using it as a tool rather than a substitute for original, critical thinking. This will be much harder for those who rely on AI without having first developed the “muscles” to think, read, write, and communicate on their own.
In the words of historian Emmarae Stein, a student who uses ChatGPT “to complete their work in high school and college, then obtains a job where they continue to use AI to organize meetings, draft notes, write emails, and perhaps even to write notes to their family,” will not only fail to develop basic skills, but will fail to develop the ability “to actively engage in tasks which are life-giving.” Because such students are developing within themselves “a deep inexperience with seeing uncomfortable mental tasks through to the end,” they won’t learn to fall in love with reality, with all its limits and rough edges, its charms and surprises. Above all, they’ll miss out on the empowering and deeply human experience of using one’s agency to be invested in the real, to be in awe in front of its mystery and a steward over it.
Social media radically reshaped my thought processes, my way of perceiving reality, my relationships, and my identity.
Thus, on top of not being a realistic option, completely swearing off AI is an inadequate response to the growing role it will continue to play in our lives. Rather, our aim should be—in the spirit of Pope Leo XIII’s method—to start by recovering our agency for the basics: restoring our relation with the real, with the limits it imposes and the wonder it provokes in our souls. On top of teaching young people to use AI responsibly—in a way that bolsters rather than replaces their agency—parents and educators ought to inculcate in them a love for truth and, above all, for reality itself.
How to do this?
Two examples come to mind. I had been reading Plato’s allegory of the cave, in his Republic, with my class of college freshmen when Charlie Kirk was killed in September of last year. Seeing how quickly people on social media divided themselves into pro– and anti–Charlie Kirk camps, I feared going into the classroom the next day. But while I was prepping, I realized how providential it was that we happened to be reading about the cave that week. I decided to use it to provoke a discussion about the media’s portrayal of Kirk’s death and the subsequent culture war that it gave rise to. Several students remarked how useful they found the text to be in helping them to articulate how mass media promote divisive narratives, as well as their frustration at having to pick a side and publicize it for all to see.
Another time, while reading Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, with its exhortation to learn to work with one’s hands and to avoid overreliance on automation, I decided to take my students to a nearby monastery, where the monks built tables and other furniture by hand. Most of the students, who had never built anything by hand, found the process of helping the monks empowering and rewarding; they discovered how having to be in tune with the small details of an object in front of you can open the door to agency in a way they never knew possible.
Magnifica Humanitas echoes the importance of this task, protecting agency in the face of forces that threaten to erase it. In Pope Leo XIV’s words, “it is necessary to design systems that are centered on the human person and not solely on performance.” From this starting point, we can learn to use AI as a tool to further engage in the work of stewarding the real, rather than manipulating or escaping it. Through the lens of subsidiarity, of maintaining proximity to the concrete and immediate, and of putting abstract or “virtual” forms of power at the service of strengthening our relationship with the real—rather than replacing our relationship with it—we can, I truly believe, learn to use AI in a way that fosters the common good.