At about seven years old, I took a runt kitten from its mother’s litter in order to make it my pet. My intention was to love the kitten and give it a happy life with my family. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was removing the kitten from an environment that was critical for its survival. As life would have it, the kitten died a few days later, and I was left baffled at the outcome. Despite my well informed intentions, my actions had directly contributed to the kitten’s demise.
Unfortunately, this pattern—good intentions unwittingly sacrificing the well being of the very thing you want to protect—is not new, and certainly is not limited to young children and their pets. Rather, it is a pattern that has found itself at home in the story of human history over and over again.
In the age of artificial intelligence, the common good and human flourishing are threatened by the current arms race to build the first artificial general intelligence, which would theoretically match or exceed human capabilities. AI isn’t inherently good or bad; it is a tool. Where the moral implications come in are in its applications, and whether those applications threaten the dignity of the human person.
It seems that while we have a lot of tech companies with the intention to make better AI for the good of humanity, they may have a blind spot about how the common good is being impacted along the way. The goal of these companies is to make the most efficient superintelligent AI. This is not a bad intention. The question is this: Has humanity itself become collateral damage along the way?
These concerns are not separate from the broader questions surrounding advanced AI. The same competitive pressures that encourage companies to build increasingly powerful systems at extraordinary speed can also incentivize cutting corners on safety, governance, and accountability. If society becomes willing to overlook present harms in pursuit of future technological supremacy, we risk creating a culture where neither ethics nor safety receive the attention they deserve.
Daryl Grigsby
In his 2024 essay “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei carefully weighed the positives and negatives of advancing AI. Coupling a sobering realism with the possibilities of a united humanity, Amodei discusses several hopes he has for advancements in biomedicine and neuroscience.
While it’s good to have a positive vision for a harmonious future, we must ensure that the means we employ to bring that goal into fruition are not unethical. We should never achieve a good end through intrinsically evil means.
Anthropic has recently partnered with several other tech companies, investing over $50 million dollars in custom data centers in New York and Texas, promising more to come. The problem is that these data centers have recently had dire impacts on Texas farmland, energy, and other resources. So much so that Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has called for a pause on the centers altogether. To be fair to Anthropic, they have taken measures to account for the issues involving Texas’ historically weak power grid, including footing the costs of raised electric bills. But electricity isn’t the only issue that data centers are affecting.
Many data centers are being constructed in residential neighborhoods, and families who own generational homes are being forced out and offered significantly less than their homes are worth. Preemptive legislation is stopping some residents from having a say on if they should have a data center in their communities at all.This fundamentally threatens the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the idea that larger institutions should not overwhelm or interfere with decisions that should be made at the local level. In Texas. where farmland and agriculture are rich resources that stimulate the economy, the state’s farm bureau has called for a more balanced approach that protects farmland and preserves resources. Some main areas of concern include groundwater supply, drought issues, and the preservation of agricultural land.
The Catholic Church views the earth as part of creation, which was given to mankind as a gift by God and should thus be stewarded responsibly and protected. This principle of stewarding the earth and its resources seems to be currently clashing with the way tech companies are swallowing water, energy, and farmland with little consideration of the effects, such as lack of food and water resources, as well as air pollution.
While it’s good to imagine a future where technology serves the common good, we must sound the alarm now and ask these tech companies if the good of the human person is being conflated with the efficiency of technology—and if the end is proportionate and justifiable by the means. Otherwise, we perpetuate what Pope Leo XIV referred to in his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas”:
“We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
In addition to environmental concerns, a troubling new study from Stanford University found that the lack of guardrails surrounding the use of AI in the labor market is impacting job seekers. “Algorithmic monoculture,” as the article terms it, involves algorithms creating a culture of uniform, homogenized outcomes within a given sector or market. In the labor market, the study found that up to 90% of employers were using a select few automated AI resume screening programs. These types of technologies evaluate applications and resumes and rate them with a score. The issue is that a low score can result from something as simple as the system’s inability to read a resume due to formatting.
As a result, millions of applicants were being systematically rejected before a human person from the company ever laid eyes on their materials. In these cases, minorities were disparately impacted. This reveals that AI is not immune to bias, and that we need to be on the lookout not just for the mechanisms employed by the technology, but for the issues that may arise as patterns over time—including how human relationships are directly impacted.
Ronald E. Smith
Such practices should evoke questions about the human person and the vocation of work. In an age dominated by corporations, and where the working class lives paycheck to paycheck, it can be easy to view work as currency to live. However, work was always meant to be more sacred. Work is not just merely a way to make a living, but is a way for human beings to provide for their families and contribute to the common good. Humans are social creatures and thrive in community with each other.
Sociologically speaking, human relationships allow us to cultivate virtue and to thrive. As an example, the first civilization was built not on humans merely communicating with each other, but on humans contributing combined skills for the good of the whole. Do we really want a society where we remove human variation and judgment from the labor market and from human interactions? Or do we want to build a society where humans use technology as a tool, bringing their inherent judgements and gifts to the decision-making process?
There is a common thread weaving through every example of issues we are facing with AI. In each instance, technology is no longer at service to be the human person, but is dominating our destinies or replacing our roles in society in some way. This is not just a predicted effect that can happen when technology rapidly advances. This is a fundamental violation of the dignity of the human person and a threat to the good of humanity. Humans created technology, so naturally technology should be subject to humankind and stewarded by us responsibly. If not, we may be losing the best parts of what makes us human.
What happens when we treat the common good like a throwaway concept in favor of technological advancement? What happens when human anthropology is artificially shifted from being fundamentally social and communal to highly individualistic and self-contained? It is in our interactions with others that we find the motivation to make sacrifices out of love for another person, that we appreciate other people as gifts. Moreover, it is at the heart of the common good to cultivate virtue. Will we choose to advance our civilization into one of love and solidarity, or will we let the most important and precious things fall to the wayside in the quest to build the biggest and best machine? We must choose wisely.
Briana Jansky is a freelance writer, author, blogger, and Live Action North Star Fellow. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Philosophy. She is currently working toward an M.A. in theology and a certification in Health Care Ethics from the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
