Escaping the Net of the Algorithm and AI

Letters from Austria, Week 3

Another week, another quick missive. The class is continuing to run me off my feet from the wee small hours of the morning until about 30 minutes past my bedtime. Many, many of those hours have been spent inside various Austrian grocery stores. I miss Instacart so much it hurts. But despite the exhaustion, the whole experience has been an absolute delight. There are few things better in this world than standing around a kitchen with a group of women, cooking, laughing, and drinking wine. Throw in getting to do that in a beautiful medieval monastery, and you have your own little foretaste of heaven.

Although my time has mostly been spent working, we did go to Salzburg last weekend with other students and faculty. It’s been almost 20 years since I last was there, and pretty much nothing has changed. The city is one of the most enchanting in the world—like Rome … but smaller … and cleaner … and quieter. There is so much to explore , and we only got to see a fraction, but the kids were especially delighted by the Hohensalzburg Fortress, the funicular, and all the gnome statues in the Mirabelle Palace gardens. If you are looking for a city in Europe that is quaint, cozy, and packed full with activities for kids, I highly recommend Salzburg.

In addition to teaching, cooking, cleaning, shopping, traveling, and small child wrangling, I’m also slowly working my way through Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. My class and I have been talking a great deal about technology, social media, and AI these past two weeks, so his timing couldn’t have been better for my purposes. (Well, maybe he could have released it a few weeks earlier, so I wasn’t trying to read it while also doing all the aforementioned teaching, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and small child wrangling. But no one at the Vatican consults me on such things, so I’m just happy I have it in hand now).

I am sure I will have thoughts aplenty on the encyclical in the coming weeks. For now, though, I wanted to share something I told the students, which I hope might be helpful to you as you think through the pope’s words.

In the years ahead, each of us will have to discern the lines which separate technology that truly serves us as human persons, made for communion, from technology that does not serve us. But the most important lines we will need to discern aren’t between software programs. They are within our own hearts.

Every single one of us has fears, insecurities, anxieties, wounds, scars, and habitual sins. The map of no two souls is the same, but every map is still marked by some weakness that makes us susceptible to the promises of the algorithm and AI. Those wounds, fears, and scars are all points where we can be manipulated—where we can be tricked into signing over our agency, silencing our creativity, and surrendering our humanity.

We can’t discern the lines between the right and wrong uses of technology if we don’t discern the lines between the right and wrong impulses in our own hearts. We have to know ourselves and see our weaknesses rightly, no matter how painful that seeing might be. If not, there will be no fighting the machine. There will only be surrender—the surrendering of our lives, bit by bit and piece by piece, until there’s nothing left to surrender.

We also can’t discern the lines between the right and wrong uses of technology if we don’t understand who God made us to be.

The algorithm wants to convince us that we are a project made to be optimized. Because if we believe that, we will buy what social media is selling. We will sign up for program after program, take supplement after supplement, and buy one product after another, all promising to make us into a better, stronger, smarter, healthier, and wealthier version of ourselves. What they promise us, in effect, is a system upgrade. And if that’s what we’re chasing, AI will offer us limitless help.

But that is not who we are. We are not projects. We are persons, made in the image of God. Which means we were made for love. We were made for joy. We were made for communion—the real, flesh and blood, heart and soul giving of ourselves to others and receiving the gift of others in return. More importantly—more mysteriously, more wonderously—we were made for the real, flesh and blood, heart and soul giving of ourselves to God and for the real, flesh and blood, heart and soul receiving of God in return.

The purpose of our life is not to operate at peak performance. It’s to love and be loved, to give and to receive, to praise and rejoice. We can’t fulfill that purpose with a program. We can only fulfill it by diving deep into the messiness of the world, getting all tangled up in the stories of others, and letting the sorrows and beauty of those stories shape the story we call our own.

There are no shortcuts in this process. There are no hacks. There is also no controlling it. At least not by us. If we want to be who God made us to be and live the life He is calling us to live, surrender is the order of the day.

Which, of course, is what makes the promises of AI so danged attractive. We want shortcuts. We want hacks. And dear Lord, do we want control.

But AI won’t give us that. In the end, it will be its own god, and keep the control all to itself.

It’s a good thing to exercise wise stewardship of our lives—of our bodies, our time, our work, our homes. But our bodies, our time, our work, and our homes are not the point. Their maximal function is not the end. They are the means. Or part of the means. For they are not the only means. Pursuing communion, pursuing love will also always require doing things that compromise our peak performance in most areas of our life. It will require endless interruptions and disruptions of all our plans. It will require staying up late with babies, leaving work early to care for someone in need, skipping exercise to tend to an aging parent, forgoing quiet time to support a friend, leaving the dishes undone to spend time with a spouse, giving lavishly to the poor instead of spending endless money on supplements, fasting with the Church and offering our hunger to Christ, eating the food another has lovingly prepared for us regardless of our macro count for the day, and lifting a glass of wine in celebration with friends.

Pursuing communion will also mean messing up. It will mean making the wrong choices and saying the wrong things. It will mean failing. And getting hurt. And losing friends. Someone will betray us. Someone will abandon us. Someone will break us. We will grieve and mourn and lament. There will be regrets and shame and guilt. There will also be sickness and death.

The true good life is not a life you can monetize. It’s a life that is spent for others. It’s a life much like the one Christ led—a life filled with work and prayer, friends and enemies, bread and wine, joy and pain, sacrifice and betrayal, suffering and death. He expended Himself lavishly. He poured Himself out for others day after day after day. And it killed Him. But it also gave Him new life.

That’s how it’s supposed to be for us, too. We just have to choose it. We have to choose to not be too precious about these bodies of ours—or our schedules, routines, homes, and plans. We also have to choose to not let our fears and wounds trick us into trading in the glorious, pain-soaked messiness of a real life for the slick avatar of a life promised by the algorithm and AI.

There is more to say, but it’s Saturday and my family is headed to Hallstatt for the day with a few other families, so I have to wrap this up.

Before I go, though, I do want to urge you to listen to the conversation Chris, Kate, Casey, and I had about AI and the human need for communion. We recorded it before we left, but only shared it this week.

Now, for the paying customers, here is what my class read, watched, talked about, and ate this week.