George Orwell (l) and Isaac Asimov (r). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

When Winston Smith first encounters his mononymous lover Julia in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, she is an employee in “Muck House,” the informal name of a department that produces titillating, low-brow materials for the proletariat. It is, of course, a department of the “Ministry of Truth.” Here is Orwell, describing a future dystopia:

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

The actual work in Muck House is not done by humans, but by machines—Julia works with a wrench—which makes it feel like a grim prophecy (the novel came out in 1949) of the way A.I. has insinuated its way into our own everyday lives. Earlier this year, The New York Times profiled an author who used A.I. to produce over 200 romance novels in a single year. Stories crop up on the regular about newspapers and magazines being caught using A.I. stories and even A.I. reporters. And just today, 404 Media reported on a federal court case in Mississippi where the lawyers on both sides were caught using A.I.—meaning that essentially one L.L.M. was fighting another: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in the courtroom. We feel a little closer to Muck House every day.

The themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four lurk behind some of Pope Leo’s most pointed criticisms of artificial intelligence in his recent encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (How do we know the pope has read his Orwell? He’s the first pontiff to use the eponym Orwellian in a papal address), not least in the pope’s warnings that without safeguards, A.I. could result in the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs with each passing year. This is, of course, exactly the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In his 1949 review of the book for America, Charles Keenan noted as much:

The rulers of that world simply desire power. They want power over every human being, over his actions, his words, his feelings, his thoughts. They would abolish all human love, all loyalty; they would be obeyed out of fear; they would rule by hate; only thus can they know that it is indeed their own power, and not the subject’s own will, that produces obedience. They are, and want to be, enemies of the human race.

So too in “Magnifica Humanitas” does Leo address the stark difference between genuine human emotions and experiences and the aping of same that A.I. accomplishes. “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,” the pope wrote. As the theologian Thomas Massaro, S.J., noted recently in America, “Leo is keen to highlight the many ways in which even the most advanced artificial intelligence remains fundamentally different from humanity—lacking sentience and unable ever to substitute for such wonders as human creativity, care and love.” 

“Leo’s project,” Father Massaro writes, “is to help us form our consciences on how we will opt to relate to new technologies—in the workplace, in schools, in our choices in civic life and even entertainment.” We don’t need Muck House, in other words; we need real moments of transcendence in our lives, moments a machine (writ small or large) can never provide. 

That question of how we will relate to new technologies is also addressed in a more lighthearted but equally prophetic literary take: Isaac Asimov’s 1961 short story, “The Machine That Won The War.” Asimov, the greatest English-language science fiction writer by a country parsec, was an avowed atheist, but almost all his tales focus on finding what is essential to—and specific to—humanity in a universe where technology rules. 

In “The Machine That Won The War,” the human race is celebrating its victory over an alien species due to the heroics of “Multivac,” a massive networked computer so far advanced beyond human or alien intelligence that it could predict every move in the interstellar war. But in the aftermath, three men involved in tending to Multivac have some confessions to make.

“Multivac had nothing to do with victory. It’s just a machine,” says one. “No better than the data fed it.” In fact, he admits, he manipulated the information that went into Multivac according to his own instincts. Actually, a second man admits, that wouldn’t really have mattered all that much, because he, the second man, had manipulated the data that came out of it. Why? He wasn’t really sure he could trust it more than his own intuition.

Neither of your actions mattered, says the third man, the one in charge of carrying out Multivac’s orders in battle. Why not? Because he also couldn’t count on Multivac. He tells the second man the truth:

“A machine did win the war, John; at least a very simple computing device did; one that I used every time I had a particularly hard decision to make.” With a faint smile of reminiscence, he flipped the coin he held. It glinted in the air as it spun and came down in Swift’s outstretched palm. His hand closed over it and brought it down on the back of his left hand. His right hand remained in place, hiding the coin. “Heads or tails, gentlemen?”

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Sympathy for the Angel,” by James Davis May. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.