Mark Labberton: Thank you for joining Conversing today. We have the great privilege and joy of welcoming Dr. Brian Patrick Green as our guest on Conversing. For some time now, we’ve had opportunities to interview various guests about AI and about its development, to reflect and think about the importance of this exploding technology. It’s shaping our lives already, and the future is upon us today. In addition, the Pope’s recent release of his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas—a document that we will provide a link to in the show notes—is an extraordinary, thrilling, exhilarating, and sobering reflection on the moment that we’re in in relationship to AI.
Dr. Green is the Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. He teaches AI ethics and space ethics at Santa Clara University’s Graduate School of Engineering. And his work focuses on AI and ethics, technology ethics in corporations, and the ethics of technological manipulation of humans. Brian has been significantly formed by his involvement and formation in the Roman Catholic Church for all of his life. He’s a person who thinks deeply through the lens of Christian faith and Roman Catholic social teaching. We first met one another through an Anthropic gathering that brought together various Christian scholars. Brian was one of the leading voices, having committed himself to this work for at least the last decade and longer.
Brian Green, welcome to Conversing. I’m so delighted to be able to have you as a guest.
Brian Patrick Green: I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I’ve known about you for many years because Greg Cootsona, our mutual friend, who’s now the executive director of AI and Faith, mentioned collaborating with you. And you and he have known one another and have shared work. And you’re involved in many different things.
Mark Labberton: But the centre of your work, from what I understand, is really ethics and theology, but particularly given toward the issues of technology in general and AI in particular. Tell us a bit about your work and why it is that you came to be engaged in this kind of research?
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, this is a good question. I do applied ethics. I work in an applied ethics centre at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Applied ethics means that it’s not just theoretical. You have to actually put it out there into reality.
And the reason I got interested in applied ethics in particular goes all the way back to after I graduated from college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My wife and I got married just a few months after we graduated, and we joined the Jesuit Volunteers International, and we went to the Marshall Islands, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far away from anything else. And this is where I became much more interested in the social impact of technology rather than technology itself. Before that, I’d been a genetics major. I was interested in biotechnology. But in the Marshall Islands, they had been used for nuclear testing after World War II. Now they’re going underwater from climate change. The United States still uses them for ballistic missile interceptor testing. But the main thing that really kind of grabbed a hold of me was the fact that almost all of my students out there had some sort of family history with radiation or with the social impact of technology, and certainly going back to World War II even—the impact of mechanized warfare on a population of people who are very peaceful and didn’t ask for any of this to happen to them.
And this got me thinking: there are things going on in the world that are much bigger than just developing new technology. It’s one thing to have new technology. It’s an even bigger question of how we actually use it and how it actually affects people.
I went to the Graduate Theological Union after that. I got my PhD. I started working at Santa Clara University. During the end of my PhD, I started working in the engineering school there, teaching ethics to engineers, and discovered that I really felt like I was doing the right thing, I guess might be the way to describe it. And it’s just built up from there. I started working more on AI in around 2016 or so. And it’s just been more and more AI every day since then.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. Let’s add one further layer a little more deeply, and that is your Roman Catholic faith. One of the things that I think about in this whole discussion that we’re about to have about AI is really the centre of Roman Catholic theology. And as a Protestant, at least I would say the centre of Roman Catholic theology is the Eucharist. And it is really about communion, literally. And it is this exquisitely important part of Roman Catholic theology and experience.
So I wonder if you could talk about that—the theme of communion in Roman Catholic theology, the role of the Eucharist—because when we come to the conversation about AI, some of the issues that are there relate, I think, foundationally to what it is that the claim of the Eucharist is, and what it is that the claim is regarding both the nature of being human and the nature of God.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, this is a great and really difficult question. I think what immediately comes to mind for me is the deep sense of embodiment of Christ in the world. It’s not just that God was incarnate as Christ at one point in history. This incarnation is ongoing, and it’s very physical. It’s something tangible. And I think that this understanding of the incarnation is something that we can look at and think to ourselves: wow, there’s actually something really precious, something really important about the material nature of the universe. This is something that God feels not just a willingness to bless once, but to bless in an ongoing, continuous, extremely embodied, integral way.
And in that way, it also embodies into us as we consume the Eucharist. It makes us become more like God. And as we continue through the material world, that material, you know, it continues to kind of spread outwards from us, if you want to think about it more mystically even, but also, materially, the matter that’s in the Eucharist joins our bodies, and then we metabolize it, we breathe it out, it goes out into the world. Eventually the entire world turns into the Eucharist, maybe. We’ll see. I mean, that’s a very mystical approach to it.
But I think with that kind of deep understanding of the importance of who we are as human beings and the importance of creation, this is not something to just disregard. We don’t look at ourselves too lightly. We don’t look at creation too lightly. We don’t want to look at ourselves too heavily either, or take ourselves too seriously. But there’s this important balance that exists between the very, very great seriousness of what God has done by incarnation and embodiment, and at the same time, the understanding that we have an important role here, but also that God is ultimately in charge. This kind of balance between the two—making sure that we’re doing our part, but also knowing that God is also doing God’s part—I think it’s just a fruitful tension in my mind.
Mark Labberton: So let’s tease that out just a bit further. Say a bit more about the implications of the Eucharist for ethics, and Christian ethics in particular.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, I think there are direct ethical implications, which are, once again, that other human beings are the image of God, right? All the theology integrates at a very deep level. It means that we need to recognize each other for who we are, which is that we are images of God. We are little pieces of God in creation. Furthermore, all of creation was created by God in love for its own sake, not only for the sake of being loved, but also for the sake of loving God in return.
But all of this integrates in a way where it has a practical implication, which is that we have to treat it correctly. Our behaviour then becomes very important. I’ve heard a lot of people say, why would God care about what humans do? They have maybe a deistic perspective on God, or they’re an atheist and they don’t understand. And the answer is that it’s very important because God has given us this dignity that we have to live out and recognize in each other. And also there’s even the creation itself—being created by God, it has its own dignity. It’s not the same as what we have as human beings, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Everything needs to be respected and loved in the way that it is, in a very deep way. It’s a very, very foundational point.
Mark Labberton: I want to suggest to our listeners that I hope that one of the things that you’ll be attentive to as we continue this conversation is the foundations of Roman Catholic social teaching and of Christian theology in general is what we’re just here talking about. These issues of incarnation, the issues of communion, Eucharist, but also the way that this has such profound social implications in the understanding of what it means to be truly human. And when we come to the AI debates, there are many, many, many issues that are worth considering. But this is the anchor, it seems to me, from a Christian analysis of almost anything, but certainly a Christian analysis of AI and its appearance as well as its activities of various kinds.
Brian, I had the opportunity to start reading a really fascinating book that you helped write, entitled Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations. It was a collection of Roman Catholic scholars who were working on the issues of the technology, or technocratic paradigm, as it was called in this document, and then contrasting that with the way that we understand human existence and meaning in life from a theological point of view. I wonder if you could read a section that I’ve given you, to use it as a way of framing what we are going to go on and talk about.
Brian Patrick Green: Sure.
The technocratic paradigm thus involves a double distortion: first, of the human person as reducible to an agent of interventions by which to manipulate life’s material conditions; and second, of the world, including the persons within it, as reducible to a field of raw material to be mastered and manipulated by means of technology. Against such reductions, the Pope urges that we cultivate a culture of encounter, a culture that seeks the contact of mind with mind and heart with heart, and a relational sharing of life that embraces the most vulnerable.
Mark Labberton: That’s a dense paragraph to listen to, I’m sure, for those who are listening. But I want to underscore again just the framing of it. So on the one hand, it’s the technocratic paradigm, and that’s defined through the lens of all that causes technology to see us as material that has function and purpose through the lens of productivity. But it’s contrasted with what the Pope is calling a culture of encounter, which is this culture that emerges out of the incarnation, out of the Eucharist, etc.—a culture that seeks the contact of mind with mind and heart with heart in a relational sharing of life, and goes on to say, that embraces the most vulnerable.
It’s that collection of ideas in this paragraph that I really want us to dwell on for just a minute, because it helps lift up, especially from a Roman Catholic point of view—a Christian point of view as well—some really fundamental distinctions that I think are critical to being able to come to the issues that AI raises in a way that feels as though it’s being anchored somewhere, as we’ve been talking about. So first, talk a little bit, Brian, from your point of view, about the goodness, but also the challenges, of the technocratic paradigm.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, the technocratic paradigm can be thought of as a worldview which fundamentally reduces the material world to economic value or raw material. You see other human beings not as people to relate to, but as cogs in a machine, or as people to be exploited—sources of wealth, sources of labour. And you see the material world around you—you see a beautiful forest, and you don’t see the birds and the animals or the plants, you just see board feet of lumber. Or you look at the ground and you don’t see a beautiful stone, you see ore for a certain material. It’s a kind of desacralization of the world, if you want to think about it that way.
There’s a wonderful quote from Wendell Berry, who says, “There are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” And I think this idea of the technocratic paradigm is a view of the world as not having any sacredness to it, when in fact it’s a desecrating worldview. It looks at the world, which is a sacred place created by God and full of other human beings who are all made in the image and likeness of God, and it looks at the raw material of the world and says, there’s nothing sacred here. We can do whatever we want to it. We can chew people up and spit them out. We can have wars where we just kill people. All the worst things in the world that we see, we can see the technocratic understanding behind that, which is that, oh, Russia’s four times the size of Ukraine, so they can afford to lose four times the number of people in a war, or something like that. That reduction of the sacredness of human life to mere numbers is kind of the core of the technocratic paradigm. And in the economic and technological context, it gets down to just turning people into data, turning people into units of exploitation.
Mark Labberton: Right. So let’s go back to the Marshall Islands. Is the technocratic paradigm what really pillaged the Marshall Islands in the way you were describing? How would you say yes or no? How do you sort that out?
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, that’s a good connection, thanks for making it. What I would say is that the technocratic paradigm certainly was there in notions of colonialism. The Marshall Islands were considered to be a colony of Spain, although the Spanish hardly did anything with it, then they were a colony of Germany and then Japan, after various wars. And then during World War II, they were certainly exploited as raw material by the Japanese. And then the United States took them over and exploited the islands and the people again as raw material—this is a place far enough away where we can actually test our biggest nuclear weapons, which has left 10% of their country essentially uninhabitable. You can go visit there, but you can’t eat the food. You can’t live there in a safe way.
And so this kind of technocratic understanding, this view of creation as something we can just do things to—it’s fundamentally a usurpation of God’s role in the world, right? It’s taking the world, which is God’s creation, and saying, this is ours, we can do whatever we want to. We can blow it up, we can make entire islands disappear, we can kill people, and we can study them—we’ll say, oh, look, radiation fallout does this to people. Now, the United States was certainly better than some other places in the world when it came to nuclear testing. But we’re certainly not above reproach when it comes to the damage that’s done by these things.
Mark Labberton: Right. So let’s choose two other topics that this relates to. One would be technocratic approaches to immigration issues, and technocratic approaches to war. So how are technocratic approaches to immigration evident, would you say?
Brian Patrick Green: It’s actually evident on both sides. There are some people who say, we want immigrants to come to our country because we want them to work—they’re units of production. They will pick our crops for us, which is something Americans don’t want to do. They’ll do other sorts of jobs that we don’t want to do. So we’ll let them in so they can work and add to our economy. That’s a fundamentally technocratic understanding of immigration.
On the other side, of getting them out of our country, then there’s this equally technocratic approach, which is that it’s all numbers. It’s like, there’s X million people in our country, we’ve decided they don’t belong here, so we get them out, and once we do that, then everything will be fine. We’ve reduced human beings who have stories and lives and relationships, and we’ve turned them into something that has no connection to the fundamental deep reality and creation and community that we’re all embedded in.
That double reduction on either side is something we want to resist. We want to get completely outside that paradigm and say, what is actually best for human beings here? How do we make sure that people are flourishing? Is there a way that we can make sure that people are achieving what God wants for all of us, in a way that we’re not viewing each other in this very reductionist or technocratic way?
Mark Labberton: Right. It’s really a remarkable thing, I think, at least about the way that the brutality that’s been expressed—in my assessment—by ICE in places which have so ridden roughshod over individual people and communities of people, in ways that are supposedly simply carrying out a policy, but are carrying out the policy in a way that is about the much opposite of encounter in the Pope’s sense as could be imagined, where the person is really just a function, a problem, has no intrinsic value. It’s just—get them in or out, let them stay or get them out of the country.
And the reason why the work that you’re doing, and the work that I hope many, many other Christian people are doing that has to do with issues of immigration as an example, is this sense of a nation state having the force and brutality to be able to implement policies that obliterate human identity rather than in any way tend to human identity. And one of the great challenges that AI is presenting is that we have even greater and greater capacity to be able to continue that paradigm and extend it even more powerfully.
I know that you’ve done significant work on just war theory in relationship to the place of AI as part of the technocratic paradigm.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah. I mean, once again, technocracy views human lives as mere numbers, right? It views creation as just something that you roll over in order to take it over. I think that we’ve seen the technologization of war proceed very rapidly in just the last five years. And partly this is because there are a lot of people who want to support Ukraine, for example. And Ukraine is being, once again, attacked by a country that’s four times their size. They don’t have the human population where they can just go one-to-one in terms of attrition with each other, which would be the technocratic approach, right? It’s like, oh, each Ukrainian has to kill four Russians—we’re just reducing people to numbers, right? These aren’t human beings with lives and stories and friends and relatives and mothers and children.
The technological aspect of that is that, well, if we’re going to help the underdogs in this equation, then they need to have better technology. And so we start seeing videos from Ukraine where drones find individual people and just fly at them and explode and kill them. And all of a sudden, killing people becomes a mere problem of efficiency, which is: how do we kill more people faster? And this is fundamentally evil, right? The idea of how do we kill more people faster is a question where, when you ask the question, you’ve already gone very far astray. You need to back up and ask yourself, how did we even get into this situation? Is there some way that we can stop this?
Mark Labberton: Right. Now, contrast that with classical Roman Catholic Christian teaching regarding just war. I just want to be sure that listeners are reminded of the contrast between that practice and the classical teaching.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, I mean, the classical understanding of just war theory is that it’s always a last resort. It’s always proportional. It’s always directed only towards combatants, not towards non-combatants. There are all these limitations on it. And if you really squeeze the limitations down to their ethical core, it becomes that war is essentially impossible. And that’s the goal, right? We don’t ultimately want to have war. There are certain circumstances under which war might be possible, and largely it consists of self-defence, or defending the innocent against aggressors who are fundamentally unreasonable or not willing to otherwise work with you in a manner other than war, in which case there is a duty to protect the innocent, a duty to protect even your own self, viewing yourself as an innocent bystander.
It’s interesting because if you go back to some of the church fathers, there wasn’t actually a really strong Christian argument for self-defence. There was a Christian argument for defending innocent third parties, somebody next to you—you could protect them, but there wasn’t actually a strong argument for your own self-defence. Now, over time, they realized, okay, you can defend yourself just as you can defend the person next to you—the only way you can defend the person next to you is by defending yourself under many circumstances. And so this understanding gradually broadened over time.
But there’s also been a lot of consideration recently about just how tightly and how stringently to look at those just war theory criteria, because it might be that just wars are becoming more and more difficult, given that technology is becoming more and more powerful, more and more indiscriminate. In a lot of cases, there are certain types of technologies that make discrimination more precise, as in, we’re only hitting combatants. But then we have to ask ourselves: if the combatant, quote unquote, has been drafted into a military, they don’t want to be there either. And so is there some way that we can otherwise adjust these criteria to make them much more Christian, ultimately? That’s something the Pope actually mentions in the encyclical.
Mark Labberton: And because our culture and society is so driven by pragmatism and by material force and by raw power and by militarism in so many different ways, it seems to me that it makes it so challenging, particularly from a Christian point of view, to have these kinds of debates even right now, where we’re involved in wars, where the opportunity to even think morally feels like it’s problematized by both government policy and particular actors in our government and in other governments. And the vision that you’re portraying, which I would completely endorse myself, is a vision that feels more and more preposterous to a secularized culture that doesn’t really hold all of these various values in the same way that you and I do, and that the Christian tradition has. I just wonder if you want to make any comment on just the challenge of doing the very thing that you’re saying we need to do.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, you’re exactly right, which is that this is more comprehensible the more you’re coming from a Christian worldview. And not only a Christian worldview—I’d say there are other religions that would also find this worldview comprehensible. But if you’re coming at this from a kind of neo-pagan or de-Christianized worldview, right, it’s back to the Roman Empire, where it’s just—might makes right. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, which is what the Athenians said to one of the islands they were invading back in ancient Greece.
And so this kind of world—I think we look at it and our guts kind of respond to it like, oh, that doesn’t feel right. But we’ve lost the cultural and worldview framework around it that makes it comprehensible in a logical and clearly explainable way, which is that this is a violation of fundamental things about human nature, fundamental things about God, fundamental things about creation. Without that framing around it, all we’re left with is our gut response, that this doesn’t feel right. And we need to ultimately think bigger, and help others to see that that gut response is accurate, but there’s much more that needs to be framed around it so that it really makes sense.
Mark Labberton: We’ve talked in beginning terms about the technocratic paradigm, but the contrast, as we’ve said before, is what the Pope is referring to as a culture of encounter. And the statement says a culture that seeks the contact of mind with mind and heart with heart in a relational sharing of life that embraces the most vulnerable. Unpack that for us and help us understand what this culture of encounter that the Pope is referring to is about.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, this culture of encounter is one of my favourite things from Pope Francis. Pope Francis said a lot of things that I really appreciated. But this idea that we’re actually supposed to view each other as images of God, right—we are the bearers of the likeness of Christ and the image of God in the world. If we take that seriously, it completely transforms the way that we have to look at each other. If we look at every other human being and we say, this is an image of God in front of me, this is a person who is loved by God just as much as I am, just as much as anyone else in the world, that really transforms our way of viewing each other.
It’s a very difficult thing to do. It’s not easy. It requires an orientation of the mind in such a way where we really have to work hard. It’s a constant act of the will to look at each other in that way. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 12 that we are to look at one another with a transformed mind, that we might be transformed by the renewing of our mind. And part of the reason for the need for the renewing of our mind is precisely for this kind of moral, ethical, spiritual action that you’ve just described. It’s all part of this culture of encounter.
Mark Labberton: And I find this distillation in this one paragraph that you just read to be extremely important. I want to move on to the encyclical that is written by Pope Leo and all of those who are advising him. I have read this encyclical a couple of times and found it incredibly inspiring and encouraging and challenging and beautiful in a very troubled time. It’s felt like this is what a sacred understanding of the world actually looks like. Tell me your own response to the encyclical, and then we’ll get into some wider opinions.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, I have to say, when I heard it was being written, I was very excited about it. In my own mind, I was kind of reducing it—like, oh, it can’t really be about AI. I was trying to reduce my expectations, because I had no idea what was going to happen. When I finally read it, I said, wow, this is much better than I was expecting. I mean, even if I’d had high expectations for it, I think it exceeded even my highest expectations of what it could have been. There is so much in there—it’s 42,000 words. It’s a lot of words. But even for 42,000 words, it’s incredibly dense. It’s hard to get all the information out of it. So just reading one paragraph, there are things to really sit there and ponder. It covers almost everything from A to Z, right, from Eden to Revelation. It’s a really expansive document and a really deep meditation on the role of technology in our world. Why is it that humans have technology? What is technology for? What are we doing with it? What kind of world should we be building?
Mark Labberton: Give people the general arc of the argument that’s being made in the encyclical.
Brian Patrick Green: Sure. So the very first sentence presents a choice: we can either create the Tower of Babel, or we can rebuild the walls of the New Jerusalem. The Babel project is this monolithic, monotone monoculture, which is fundamentally going to wrap everything up into one big totalitarian hug, if you want to think about it that way, where we’ll never get out of it. It’s the cage that closes in, and eventually you become the cage—we become our own cage.
And the opposite of that, this conception of the New Jerusalem, is being rebuilt by Nehemiah. When Nehemiah returns to Jerusalem from Persia, the walls have been torn down and they have to rebuild it. And he has to figure out how to do that, so he talks to everybody in town and says, how do we put this back together? And collectively, cooperatively, they figure out how to make it happen. This much more diverse, much more synodal understanding of how to put things together—synodal meaning talking to each other, right, how do we actually converse and make this thing happen that we need to do—is the view that Pope Leo wants to put forward.
Over the arc of the encyclical—and again, that was just the first sentence—he gets into this in a little more depth. There’s a chapter talking about the history of Roman Catholic social teaching as fundamentally a response to technology, which I read and said, yes, thank you, this is wonderful, I’m so glad somebody finally wrote this. Then it gets into some of the more specific things, like, what are five principles that we can look at? First, the foundation, which is human dignity. Then there’s the common good, the universal destination of goods, the notion of subsidiarity, which means local decision-making, solidarity—which I like to think of as being a voluntary fraternity, how do we really look at each other as brothers and what does that mean—and then ultimately, the last one, social justice: how do we build the institutions necessary to make all this real in life?
Chapter three is looking at the technology itself, at AI. And it’s a really interesting chapter—there are two paragraphs in there that are in very great tension with each other, paragraphs 98 and 99. Paragraph 98 says, AI is changing really fast and we don’t really understand it very well. And then the next paragraph, 99, says, but AI is not this, and it’s not that, and it’s not that. So some people have looked at that and said, oh, this looks like a contradiction, it looks like two different people wrote that, what’s going on here? I like to look at that as just a tension—a fruitful tension. On one side, there’s an unknown, and there’s rapid change. On the other side is: what, philosophically or more eternally, are we dealing with here? What’s solid in the midst of all that changes?
It goes on to chapters four and five. The Pope gets into more detail about particular ethical issues related to technology, and then what our response can be. Chapter five is about the culture of power and the civilization of love—how do we, we have these two contrasting things with each other, one of which is obsessed with power and aggression and the technocratic paradigm and all those things we’ve been talking about, and the other is, how do we build a civilization of love? If you want to go back to St. Augustine, it would be the City of God—how do we build the City of God here? What does it mean for us to be participants or members of that city?
And I think, altogether, there’s just so much to read. You can almost skip to any paragraph in there and say, well, what does this section say, what does it say over here—and each little piece will give you something important. But when it’s all rolled up together, it becomes this comprehensive worldview, which I think is very attractive. There are a lot of people in the tech industry and in other places who have read this and said, I’m not Christian, I’m not a member of this worldview, but I read this and say, wow, this is something that really speaks to my heart and is something really important to have said in the world.
Mark Labberton: I have had that same experience, of talking to people who don’t share the Christian faith but who are deeply moved by the encyclical and feel as though it holds up, around one set of issues, a particular time and place in the world, in history, in human understanding and self-reflection—which I think people crave in a certain way, even if they may or may not be able to buy into the Christian perspective. They understand the attraction of this through the beauty of how this is, I think, articulated, and the honouring of people.
So now that the encyclical has been out for a few months, what are you finding is its impact?
Brian Patrick Green: The impact has actually been much greater than I would have expected. There are people, of course, in the tech industry who have read it, and that goes all the way from workers up to CEOs who have talked about it. There are a lot of people saying, I think I’ve been building the Tower of Babel, how do I get on this different work project? And hearing that question is music to my ears—it’s exactly what I think the Pope was hoping for by writing this.
Not just in the tech industry has this impact been felt, however. I was just in Geneva, in Switzerland, at the United Nations, talking to various ambassadors from various countries about these issues, and I was amazed at some of the wonderful things I heard. There was one ambassador—I’m going to have to paraphrase—but she said something to the effect of, I’m not very sympathetic towards the Catholic Church, but I’m very grateful that the Pope wrote this document. And there were other people, of course, who are more sympathetic towards the Catholic Church. Other ambassadors said things like, we’re spending an hour talking about this now, but I want to spend days talking about this. The level of interest is very high. And I think it also kind of lights a motivational fire, which is that, maybe we need to do something—if the Pope thinks this is important, maybe this is actually important. And I think there’s just a lot of opportunity there for us to continue this conversation.
One thing I’ve talked about with a lot of people is that it’s one thing for the Pope to say something, and it’s another thing for people to actually hear it and do something about it. So I like to think of ourselves as all having a role—we all have a role here. If we read this thing, or if we think the message is important, we need to go out there and share it and continue making it real. One of the things I got from talking to various policy-oriented people is they ask things like, well, did the Pope give us any policy recommendations? And the answer to that is, the Pope is talking at a more abstract level. There are some ideas in there that could be turned into policy, but that actual work of turning it into policy is something that has to be done at our level—it’s something we as individuals have to do.
One other thing—I think you were mentioning some of these conversations earlier also, with different religions. I talked to a rabbi, and the rabbi said to me, I think that the conversations we’re having on AI are going to be before Magnifica Humanitas and after Magnifica Humanitas. He saw it as flipping the page to the next chapter—this is really the close of one epic and the opening of another one. It’s one thing to say that; it’s another thing for us to make it happen. We have to really be the ones to make it happen.
Mark Labberton: I want to bring the two documents that I’ve referred to back into conversation together, because I think it’s a very important part of the encyclical. I’ve read, as you did first, that in the end this culture of encounter that we had first been talking about is ultimately measured by a relational sharing of life that embraces the most vulnerable. Now, that is certainly following the teaching of Jesus and the emphasis of Scripture overall. Certainly it embodies Roman Catholic social teaching, and it’s critical to the document about encountering. But now bring us to the encyclical—how does that embrace of the most vulnerable figure into the way the argument of the encyclical lays out?
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, I think it’s fundamentally the two choices, right? You go back to Deuteronomy, or you go back to the ancient Christian Didache—there are two ways, two paths in the world. There’s the way of life and the way of death. The way of death is the one where, you know, the devil takes the hindmost, right, and eventually the hindmost is you, and there’s nobody left. And then the culture of life, or this perspective of the way of life, the civilization of love that we’re seeking, is one where you protect the most vulnerable, because you know that they’re the same as you. They might be different from you, but ultimately you’re one in the body of Christ together.
Mark Labberton: Yes. It’s an amazing emphasis that I think, again, in a time when pragmatism and power and money is such a dominant part of every day’s headlines—this is not new to history, but it flourishes right now with the extreme differentiation in economic status and many other things—that this underscoring of the need to understand AI, in part because of its implications in relationship to the most vulnerable, is a distinctively Christian way of coming at this set of issues. And I do think it’s a sign of how far down the technocratic paradigm we are that it may be so hard to recover why that would really matter in a conversation about AI. The encyclical, and this earlier document—but the encyclical makes it so evident that these two things are part and parcel of one thing. That’s part of a Roman Catholic worldview and of a Christian worldview that I think sees the interconnectedness of all of these human realities, as opposed to being segmented and compartmentalized off. Can you just talk about that coherence that’s part of Roman Catholic social teaching, and then bring it home through the lens of the encyclical?
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, gosh, there’s a lot there. One thing I say to people is that when I’m thinking, I can go off in all these different directions, so if I end up not answering your question, please reel me back in. But the thing that comes to mind with that, when it comes to the most vulnerable, is that we’re really not that different from each other, right? Compared to God, we’re all just dust. And so if one grain of sand says to the other grain of sand, “I’m better than you are,” that’s a weird thing for sand to be saying to each other, right? That’s fundamentally not how we need to be looking at this relationship.
And yet, at the same time, the title of the encyclical is Magnifica Humanitas—this is something that is magnificent humanity. It’s an encyclical about AI ostensibly, but really it’s an encyclical about humanity, and what our role is here in the universe. There is a tension, like I was saying—you go back to the Roman Empire versus Jesus, or Egypt versus the Israelites, or any of these archetypal oppositions in history, in the Bible and in other places, and we see that there’s one side, which is kind of the technocratic oppression, trying to force people to do things, to enslave them, to exploit them, to merely turn them into units of production, of taxes—for example, to go back to the emperor in Rome. And we have to oppose that. We have to say, no, fundamentally every human being is of equal, infinite dignity, which is so hard to understand. And if we start to reduce each other to this economic perspective, or a mere exploitative or power perspective, we’ve gone very far away from what Jesus wants for us. This is sacrificial love—we have to see each other as being so valuable that we are willing to die to care for each other.
I think one of the reasons why I said earlier that reading the encyclical felt to me like a bath, a kind of moral bath, is that it named these primary things that Christian theology believes so strongly, that are so central, but it brought them so actively into conversation with the most prominent non-human reality that we’re encountering now, which is really AI.
Mark Labberton: I wonder if you could bring our conversation today to a close by giving us maybe two headlines that you would say are the things you find most promising about AI and what you’re most excited and appreciative to see. But also, when you think about the seriousness of the challenges that AI now puts on our table, what would those be as well?
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, I don’t know if I can choose just two, but I’ll keep it smaller rather than bigger. I think the opportunities with medical intervention are very clear—there’s just too much data, humans can’t sift all of it, but AI is very good at sifting data. There are a lot of opportunities when it comes to finding places where injustice has been hiding that we haven’t noticed before. A lot of people have talked about machine bias and algorithmic bias, and those are real problems. But AI is also very good at finding those biases in the first place and then figuring out perhaps methods of how to de-bias that data.
We had a professor on campus who let his students go through a database of, I think it was 100,000 small business loans, and he said, find the bias in the data. And they found very strong biases—if you were white, you had a 10% greater likelihood of getting a home or a small business loan than if you were Black. And if you were a man, you were 10% more likely than if you were a woman. And so they found these biases and presented them to the class as part of their class project. And then he said, now figure out a way to make the bias go away. And they said, what does that mean? And the thing is, if you can figure out what the bias is, you can then say, okay, we’re going to give everybody who should have gotten the 10%, we can give that to them, or we can bring everyone to a midpoint, or whatever fairness means in that context. And it’s very difficult to actually define fairness in a lot of these ways, because it’s very sensitive to context.
So this de-biasing opportunity, I think—and I also mentioned healthcare—I think the environmental opportunities are really fantastic too. Every day there are companies that scan the entire Earth’s land surface. The satellites just go around the Earth, the Earth rotates under the satellite, and they look at everything. All the land surface gets uploaded, gets a picture taken and downloaded, and it’s vastly too much data for humans to look at. If every human being in the world was looking at this data, trying to analyze it, we could not do it. What they have instead is an AI do it. And they’ve literally classified everything on the face of the earth that can be visible from space—here’s an airplane, here’s a car, here’s a truck, here’s a building, all those things down to as much detail as they want to go to. And they can say, oh, there’s an expansion of deforestation here in the Amazon or in the Congo, somebody just chopped down another tree, or all these sorts of things—or the forest is growing back in China or other places like that. All these things can be recorded and looked at, and all of a sudden you can gather this data that’s never been processable before, because it’s just too big for humans to look at.
Mark Labberton: Yes, it is astounding.
Brian Patrick Green: Oh, and then the negative side of things. Big concerns with warfare, I think, are obvious. The Ukrainians have now gotten to the point where they tell the drones, go into this area and kill any human that you see, and the drone goes into that area and kills any human that it sees. So autonomous warfare has already started, and this is not a road we want to go down. There are lots of dystopian movies about this, and dystopian movies are things we should have learned from when they first happened.
I think there’s a lot of reduction of human beings to data. It’s very much an extension of the technocratic paradigm, where you reduce people to data and then treat them as though they’re data—this person is just a number in a system. And if we start doing that to people, and ignoring the fact that they have relationships and desires and that they’re human beings who want something good in their lives, and it might not be the same thing that the AI, or whoever controls the AI, wants, then we’ve set ourselves up for dystopia. We’ve seen this in terms of the way mass surveillance is progressing in various countries around the world, and the way it could progress in the Western world. And how do we still get to be free when fundamentally we have all these things that are going to try to control us as we go forward?
One thing I’ll say—you mentioned Encountering AI. That came out in December of 2023. In December of 2025, we just published another book called Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The paper version of that will be coming out in a few more weeks. The electronic version is already out—it’s available for free online, just like Encountering Artificial Intelligence is available for free online. And in that book, Reclaiming Human Agency, we really ask ourselves: do we get to still make choices in the future, or is AI going to take all of that away from us? Why is it that we’re feeling disempowered if AI is supposed to be empowering us? These kinds of questions about the role of human agency, what we’re supposed to be doing in the future, are obviously ethically important and personally important for each one of us, but they’re also really theologically important. God gave us freedom. God put us in a world that is free so that we can be free and make free choices. And if we start imposing this outside control and limitations on our freedom, we’re really going to be exposing ourselves, or creating for ourselves, a situation that does not seem to be the kind of world that God wants at all. And I think at a gut level, we understand that as well.
Mark Labberton: One of the things that is so striking to me about the encyclical is the Pope’s own personal agency. Now, he’s doing it in his role, of course, but it’s also his choice to do this or to do that. And in this case, he’s done this really quite remarkable piece of writing—the comprehensiveness of it, the integratedness of it. Undoubtedly, other people have influenced him, but I’m just moved by the fact that it feels so consistent with the character of the Pope that he would do this. I think it’s a further example of the role of human beings in the pursuit of these face-to-face, heart-to-heart, mind-with-mind kinds of encounters that I experienced as I was reading this document. It felt as though one person was actually presenting something that was as humane as this out of his own personal theological, spiritual integrity. Is that how you read it?
Brian Patrick Green: I agree with you completely. I think one of the amazing things about this document is that he chose to write it. This is something he could have completely ignored as a subject. In fact, when Pope Francis died, I was very concerned that all of the work I was doing with the Vatican was just going to disappear, and that the next pope would have no interest in this subject at all. And then the series of announcements came, and I watched him appear on the balcony, and the announcer says, this is Pope Leo XIV. And I’m like, wow, Pope Leo XIV—this is very significant, because of who Pope Leo XIII was. And then the next day he says, and I’m doing this because of artificial intelligence being the new industrial revolution. And I went, wow, this is beyond what I could possibly have imagined.
His interest in AI is something that’s really important. Obviously I found it personally important because I’m deeply involved in this. But the next level is also the example it sets—the Pope chose to use his agency to do something about this. And now it’s time for us to choose to use our agency to do something about this. He’s setting an example for us to follow. He’s not meant to be some superhero far away who just says something and then nothing else happens. The only superpower that the Pope has is the ability to say something and for other people to listen. And that all comes down to what we’re going to do now. Are we going to exercise our agency? Will we choose to build Babel, or will we choose to rebuild Jerusalem?
Mark Labberton: Amen. I did find the whole thing so inspiring. It’s just one of those things that, especially when you take a topic like AI, which is basically frozen in a conversation around economics, around personal and organizational corporate power, and the politics of our nation at this particular time—and in that sense, the politics of the world—and instead, you come to this document, and it’s looked at through a humane lens, through an understanding of what the human is, with an ability to sophisticatedly and adequately, more than adequately, wrestle with the actual technological issues that are involved, the technocratic paradigm, as it were, and to bring them into such active, deep conversation is to recentre the conversation from simply being about economics and simply being about power to being about so much more than those two things.
I just found the encyclical incredibly inspiring, which is why I just keep reading it, because I keep coming back to it as this inspirational document. I would encourage anybody who might consider it to actually take time to slowly read through the whole encyclical. I think because it’s written in numbered paragraphs, the opportunity you have to just take a very slow read and make your way paragraph by paragraph is well worth your time.
Brian Patrick Green: Yeah, it’s an amazing document. I’m so happy it was written, and I’m so happy that I get to talk about it.
Mark Labberton: Brian, this has been so stimulating, and I am extremely grateful for the work that you’re doing in partnership with many others in all kinds of different directions. And I hope that all of us go away more than stimulated. Thank you so much.
Brian Patrick Green: It’s been a pleasure being here.
