Lecturer: Encyclical combats narrative of inevitability

In an opinion piece, Dr Andrew Shepherd, a senior lecturer in Theology and Public Issues in the theology programme at the University of Otago, said the encyclical does not accept a discourse of technological determinism. Rather, it illustrates the choice humanity faces.

In one option, “willingly or unwillingly, we participate in the building of another Tower of Babel: constructing an economy managed by a wealthy elite who control the technology and reap the financial benefits, thus creating a society that ‘sacrifices human dignity for efficiency’”, Dr Shepherd said of Pope Leo’s document.

“Option two requires a rejection of this ‘Babel syndrome’ in which ‘the idolatry of profit sacrifices the weak’.”

“For Leo XIV,” Dr Shepherd said, “while ‘technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect’, this is only possible when we build together for the common good.

“Noting that technological innovations, like AI, can ‘foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion’, Leo XIV contends that our use of such technologies must be evaluated according to a key question: do these technologies ‘truly help individuals and peoples to become more humane and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations’?”

Dr Shepherd also referenced the Global Justice Report, authored by the World Inequity Lab led by French economist Thomas Piketty, which confronts the challenges of climate change and global inequality.

“It is not, the authors contend, inevitable that we face a grim future of increasing global inequality and diminished planetary habitability,” Dr Shepherd said.

“Climate change and increasing societal and global inequality, the report insists, are not separate but inextricably connected and solvable issues.

“Both reports make clear that we should not accept the two prevailing discourses of inevitability: AI as the salvific technology that solves all our problems, or, the opposite, an apocalyptic narrative, where out-of-control AI, climate realities and inequality lead to humanity’s inescapable demise,” Dr Shepherd continued.

“The reports remind us that despite emerging technologies and contemporary challenges of our own making, humanity, made not as a machine but in the image of God, continues to have dignity and agency.”

FULL STORY

A catastrophic future for humanity is not inevitable as we have agency (By Dr Andrew Shepherd/Otago Daily Times)