As we encounter artificial intelligence in our daily lives, Father Dave welcomes professor and author Dr. Joseph Vukov to discuss his new book, “Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence.” Dr. Vukov serves as Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Associate Director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago.
He notes that there is no singular definition of AI but says, “I like to think about artificial intelligence as prediction-making tools that make their predictions [based] on giant sets of data.”
Dr. Vukov gives an example of how companies use AI to sell goods. “I don’t know about you, but I use Amazon probably way too much,” he says. “I’m always buying books. The more you use Amazon, the more artificial intelligence takes that data, compares your book browsing to millions of other Amazon browsers, and to a fairly accurate degree can predict what kinds of books you’re going to like next.”
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Dr. Vukov continues, “One of the concerns that a lot of ethicists are thinking about is the ways in which algorithms can nudge you this way or that. Sometimes that can be an okay thing, but sometimes that can be a disturbing thing, because we would like to think that we’re making decisions for ourselves.”
As artificial intelligence continues to intersect with our humanity and faith, Dr. Vukov discusses the importance of Catholic Teaching on bodies and souls. “We do look at artificial intelligence and think that it is disturbingly close to the way a human intelligence thinks and acts,” he says. “There is, in the popular consciousness, this idea that humans are purely immaterial, ethereal computing machines; that’s what we think of our soul or our intelligence as being. The Catholic tradition has a very long, storied tradition of saying, ‘no…the human being is both body and soul.’”
“As soon as you bring that into the equation, all of a sudden it becomes clear that, yeah, [artificial intelligence] is an interesting tool and machine, and maybe it mimics aspects of our humanity,” Dr. Vukov says. “But it can’t be the whole thing, because very obviously, it doesn’t have a human body. In the Catholic tradition, that’s who we are; It’s our bodies.”
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Father Dave quips, “I think you’ve just written my homily for the Feast of the Assumption, because that’s when we talk about Mary being assumed body and soul into heaven. She’s the forerunner; It’s happened to her, but it’s going to happen to all of us. Our bodies are an important part.”
Dr. Vukov adds, “The resurrection that Jesus taught and that we hope for is a bodily one. It’s not just floating off somewhere. The sacraments, I think, only fully make sense if we understand ourselves as essentially embodied. That’s why Christ comes to us in the sacraments in an embodied way. It’s not enough to just have communion with Christ in a vague spiritual sense.”
