NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
The Vatican’s recent document on artificial intelligence, Antiqua et Nova — "The Old and the New" — is not a technical treatise, but a philosophical reminder: The advance of AI provokes in new ways fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and the kind of people we must become to wield powerful tools responsibly.
Pope Leo XIV has echoed this concern, praising AI as an "exceptional product of human genius" while warning that instant access to information can swiftly become a counterfeit for genuine understanding — especially by the young, whose intellectual and moral development will be stunted if machines do the "thinking" for them.
You need not be a person of faith to recognize the problem. Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI," has warned that the risks have moved beyond science fiction, and is increasingly worried about AI’s ability to outperform humans in ways that are not in the best interest of humanity.
TEENS TURNING TO AI FOR LOVE AND COMFORT
Speed, however, is not insight. Pattern-matching is not judgment. AI is an astonishingly powerful tool, yet it remains utterly blind to the things that make us wise.
The core issue is perennial: What is intelligence, and how is it formed?
There is a difference between knowing information and being wise. Real knowledge isn’t the compilation and synthesis of data; it’s apprehending what a thing is, understanding its essence; discerning why it is, understanding its purpose; and cultivating practical wisdom (what Aristotle calls phronesis) to judge what’s called for in real-life situations.
By that measure, today’s AI is not intelligent in a human sense. It manipulates symbols at astonishing speed but cannot grasp meaning, deliberate about the good, or decide what is worth doing.
The real danger, then, is not that AI will become "conscious" and dominate us, but that we will deskill ourselves — producing generations adept at prompting machines, yet impoverished of right judgment. As psychologist Jordan Peterson puts it, we must "get our act together" and become wise in proportion to our technological power before the destabilizing consequences overwhelm us.
The solution is not to reject AI altogether — as it can and will be used for any number of projects that will benefit us — but to revive the habits of mind and character cultivated by a serious education, and one that is all too rare in today’s marketplace of higher learning.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION
The fruits of what’s come to be known as a classical, liberal arts education are all the more important to consider in today’s age:
- Close reading of great, timeless texts trains one’s attention to understand nuance and context that no algorithm can supply;
- Logic and mathematics sharpen reasoning and expose fallacies that chatbots present as ‘truth’;
- History, literature, and philosophy enlarge moral imagination and reveal that today’s technologies are neither inevitable nor unproblematical;
- Ethics and political philosophy compel us to ask what constitutes a good life and a just society, moral judgements that machines simply cannot make.
These disciplines are more urgently needed than ever precisely because our tools are growing more powerful. The best engineers and policymakers will be those who have wrestled with questions of ends as well as means — who can ask not only "Can we build this?" but, "Should we?" And if it is to be built, how can it be done so as to augment rather than diminish the human estate?
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Regulation is necessary; debates over AI in warfare, surveillance, and education are already under way. Yet laws alone cannot produce citizens and leaders able to scrutinize these systems and insist that technology remain a servant, not a master, of human development.
That is a cultural task. It begins in homes and schools that prize truth and beauty over convenience, and in universities that refuse to outsource thinking to machines. In the age of AI, societies that flourish will be those that still know how to form leaders capable of saying, when necessary, "We must not." Wisdom, not computational processing power, will become the even scarcer resource that no machine can supply.
Jonathan J. Sanford, PhD, is a professor of Philosophy and president of the University of Dallas, a Catholic liberal arts university with campuses in Irving, Texas and Rome, Italy.
