What Are We Building? AI and the Grandeur of Humanity

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COZ161: Are we building a Tower of Babel, or rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem? That question sits at the heart of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence, and it frames this episode of Catholics of Oz.

Lindsay Sant returns to the Pope Leo AI encyclical after a month off air, with Caroline Knight and Lino Saubolle. Lindsay walks through chapter three, “Technology and Dominance,” where Pope Leo picks up Pope Francis’s warning about the technocratic paradigm and insists that AI only imitates human intelligence. It feels no joy or pain, grows through no relationships, and carries no moral conscience. Caroline, who uses AI regularly, calls it what it is: a useful tool, never a friend. Lino adds a news story about a data centre rising in the middle of a suburb and a film where an AI sits as judge, jury, and executioner.

Chapter four turns to safeguarding humanity: truth as a common good rather than the property of the powerful, education that teaches when not to use AI, and work that is never reduced to efficiency. The team weighs the land, water, and power data centres demand, Australia’s push for national standards on them, and the lesson of social media algorithms let loose too early. Lindsay closes with the encyclical’s four commitments for the “construction site” of our time: stay faithful to the truth, invest in education beginning with ourselves, cultivate relationships, and love justice and peace.

Then Caroline brings the science. A new study in iScience put trained family dogs in an MRI scanner and showed them photos of human faces. Happy faces lit up the caudate nucleus, a reward region, and the dogs’ brain activity could tell happiness apart from sadness, fear, and anger, with fear standing out from the other negative expressions. Caroline shares how her own dogs read her calm on a frightening night, and the team trades notes on pack instincts, guide dogs, and cats who rule the house.

If you’ve wondered whether dogs understand human facial expressions, or can tell when you’re sad, the answer is more interesting than you’d think. Smile at your dog.

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Catholics of Oz