AI and the Miracle that Makes Us Human

It occurred to me recently, like a lit match in a black vault, that I’ve never been unloved. The same applies to my wife, our children, and grandchildren. None of us has ever been unloved. We’ve had setbacks and difficulties in fifty-five years of marriage and family, yes; but an absence of love, no. And I say this because our experience is very far from unique. We humans expect love. We presume it as a kind of oxygen; a debt owed to us like a right or entitlement, starting with our parents. We suffer without it. Yet we too often take it for granted, and thus too easily lose it.

So much for the obvious. What, if anything, it has to do with the urgent issue of the day—in this case, AI and its implications—will become clear in a moment. 

In 1969 Brian Aldiss published a small piece of fiction about a five-year-old boy named David and his talking toy bear, Teddy. In the story, David has no friends. So he spends his time playing and talking with Teddy, and writing notes to his mother. Every note says the same thing: how much he loves her. He writes them again and again, day after day, because he can sense her emotional distance; her inability to return his love. David is a typical, beautiful child, but with a few modest differences. He can’t age. He can’t sleep. And he can never dream. David is a perfect android; a machine programmed for childlike love in an overpopulated world where births are strictly licensed. He’s only vaguely aware that something is wrong with what he is. And in the end, malfunctioning and no longer needed, he’s discarded as mechanical trash.

Stanley Kubrick bought the rights to the Aldiss story—“Supertoys Last All Summer Long”—and reshaped it into a Pinocchio tale. Kubrick died before he could bring it to the screen, but he left the rights to Steven Spielberg. And Spielberg translated it into the brilliant, deeply moving film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, among the finest work of his career. In the Spielberg telling, David does finally experience the love of his mother. And in that love, he can at last sleep, and dream, and become a “real” boy.

I’ve watched the Spielberg film half a dozen times over the years. It never gets old. And it’s worth watching especially now, to ready ourselves for Leo XIV’s first encyclical, widely reported to deal with AI and set for release this Friday, May 15. The movie is an exquisite fantasy; relevant, beautiful, but also misleading.

Its beauty lies in capturing a simple truth: We’re creatures made for love. We need each other to both give and receive it. The free gift of our love to another is a necessary step in our own happiness, and David loves unconditionally. But it’s not sufficient. We also need to be loved and know we’re loved because it’s the reciprocal nature of love, freely given to us by another, that grounds us in the world. It affirms that we’re “real,” and recognized, and belong here.

The film is also misleading, though, because David is finally a manufactured thing. No amount of yearning or magic can change that. We humans can admire but never truly love the work of our own hands. The reason is simple. Anything we can build or make is never really different from us. It’s an artifice that bears our own presumptions and limits. It’s never a conscious, independent “Other” giving us something we don’t, on some level, already have. This is what makes the original Aldiss story less heartwarming but more authentic than the film. David’s mother can’t love him, no matter how hard she tries, because she can’t escape knowing what—not who—he is.

The relevance of both the film and the story becomes obvious. Rémi Brague in The Kingdom of Man and Carl Trueman in The Desecration of Man both explore, with exceptional skill, the central questions of our age. These are found in Psalm 8: Who and what is man, and where does our unique dignity—if any—come from? Today we’d rather ignore such thought-irritants as obsolete religious baggage. Our species now has a seeming mastery of nature unparalleled in history, and we revel in it. But nature isn’t so easily ruled; it always bites back. Any “humanism” that excludes the existence of a God who guarantees the sanctity of every human life, and the moral constraints that come with it, ends up degrading the very humanity it claims to exalt.

Yet that’s exactly where we find ourselves in the “developed” world as a culture: riding the crest of a very practical atheism disguised by sunny, endless tech possibilities. This, despite the fact that no matter how powerful our technologies might become, we’re not gods and never will be. And knowledge without wisdom is a poison. We’re imperfect creatures intolerant of imperfection and thus, too often, highly intelligent fools. The last century showed us where that leads. Fools with tools are still fools. The more powerful the tools, the more dangerous the fools who use them in the name of science, improving the species, and (inevitably) cleaning out the weak. Today’s transhumanist imaginings exemplify a hatred of the body’s inadequacy, a disgust with the material fabric of humanity, and all such hatred has a metastatic DNA.

Which makes Leo’s forthcoming encyclical so potentially important.

In these last hours before the encyclical’s arrival, it’s worth browsing two Vatican documents that perfectly set the stage for it. The first is “Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.” For a Roman text, it’s remarkably readable and immensely valuable in content. The second—more turgid but also too rich to ignore—is “Quo Vadis, Humanitas? Thinking through Christian Anthropology in the Face of Certain Scenarios for the Future of Humanity.”

As Antiqua et Nova reminds us, “AI can simulate aspects of human reasoning and perform specific tasks with incredible speed and efficiency, [but] its computational abilities represent only a fraction of the broader capacities of the human mind.”

I suppose the point here is this. When I look at the woman at the center of my life, or our son with Down syndrome, or our grandchildren with special needs, what comes to mind is something more than a cost-benefit analysis. It’s those few simple words of Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”—and no machine can ever know. It’s that “broader capacity” we call love. It’s the miracle that makes us human.