A.I., the Incarnation and the true source of human dignity

“And the Lord God formed a man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living soul.” This description of the creation of humanity in Genesis 2:7 offers a striking account of human nature, with a different emphasis than that of Genesis 1, where humanity is made in the image of God and immediately given dominion over the earth. In this second account, we owe our existence to two things: the breath of God and the mud. 

We are reminded of this dual origin in Genesis 3:19, in a phrase Catholics hear every Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust; and to dust you shall return.” Some of Pope Benedict XVI’s last words as pope were on this very question: “We come from the good earth through the work of the good Creator,” he said in 2013. “In addition there is another fundamental reality: All human beings are dust, over and above the distinctions made by culture and by history, over and above every social difference; we are one humanity modeled with God’s one earth.”

The paradox of remembering that we are dust in order to recognize that we are the work of God in the image of God helps anchor us at a moment when the development of artificial intelligence threatens to alter human life in ways contrary to biblical notions of justice, human dignity and right relationship with the earth and one another. The account of our own creation reframes our struggle to understand and govern what we have created in turn.

So too does the revelation of the Incarnation, as we journey through Advent in these coming weeks. On Christmas morning, God, too, chose to be born of humble estate, not just being laid in the manger but in the very nature of incarnation itself—the kenotic act of the Word becoming flesh so that we might all be made partakers of God’s divine nature. Yes, Jesus Christ is fully divine, but he is truly human, too, born of dust. And yes, we are dust, but on that Christmas morning we also became magnificent, in all the senses of that word.

It is a proud claim, one that can sound incongruous in an age when our humanity is often belittled and frequently imperiled in so many ways, and yet we still make it. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” repeats this bold assertion both in its title and in its opening line, which reminds us that humanity was “created by God in all its grandeur.” Further, “in Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness.”

Even beyond the risks of artificial intelligence escaping human control, we face the temptation of using its new capabilities in ways that exploit, rather than ennoble, our fellow human beings. As in the Industrial Revolution, whose encroachments upon everything from family life to the safety and dignity of workers spurred Pope Leo XIII to write “Rerum Novarum,” so too does artificial intelligence threaten the building blocks of a rightly ordered society in ways that can reduce humans themselves to little more than machines—tools that can be exploited, broken, cast away.

Before A.I.’s threat to human dignity is fully understood and appreciated, some of the leading practitioners in the field are asking whether A.I. models may deserve to be recognized as conscious and thus possessed of moral dignity themselves. Leo XIV reminds us, however, that our dignity is far richer than our intelligence: “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.” 

In an essay on consciousness and A.I. in this issue, Meghan Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame notes the danger of replacing the concept of human dignity with the notion of consciousness as a basis for ethical consideration. Humans are more than thinkers, she writes: “We are capable of emotions, like love. Our minds not only process information, they grasp truth, goodness and beauty, which are objective features of reality.”

For Pope Leo, one of the operative images in this struggle to preserve human dignity is that of the Tower of Babel, and he notes in “Magnifica Humanitas” that when we attempt to replace humanity with something created in our own image, we are also attempting to replace God.

“The risk of dehumanization—of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means—is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise,” he writes. Instead, he calls on us to work together to use these new technologies in a way that respects and enhances human flourishing.

The irony of arguing that machines or models “think” and are therefore entitled to rights is this: We often do not even extend these rights to each other. We find ourselves at times in the absurd situation where someone can argue that Claude or ChatGPT has rights while at the same time ignoring the needs of a neighbor.

What makes us human? The dust of the earth from which we came and to which we will return, to be sure. As the theologian Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., has noted, that dust is shared with all creation; each of us (and everything around us) is stardust, as was Jesus Christ from the moment of the Incarnation. But what else forms us? It is the breath of God, breathed into our nostrils at creation and poured out on us at Pentecost and blowing where it will throughout our lives. It is the action of God that gives life and the promise of divinity to our humanity, that gives us an origin and a destination that no machine or model shares. 

So many of the world’s ills, particularly with regard to our care of creation and one another, can be traced to humanity’s outsized appreciation for itself. And yet perhaps the signs of the times in this particular age remind us: Sometimes it is important to hold up what it is in us that is magnificent. Not by our own merit, but by gift:

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.

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