AI is not “inherently evil” in the sense that it can be used exclusively to bomb and oppress. But not even nuclear weapons or machine guns work that way. We are never caused to do anything by a tool (or a narcotic). There is therefore no trade-off between using Claude and “reading stories to a child” or “offering company to an elderly person” or the other activities that the encyclical commends to our attention as human. But that is just the problem, that even as the trade-off does not happen at the level of content, it cannot but take place at the level of formal tendencies. Almost no one idolizes AI, but the technocratic paradigm is a matter of form rather than content: a matter of habitual incentives that, once internalized, become practically imperative. And the Church has not yet recognized heresies of form.
I wish I understood what Barba-Kay means here by “formal tendencies,” “heresies of form,” etc. But I think he might be thinking along the same lines I followed in this post on habitus, focal practices, and the virtues required for healthy praxis. I should perhaps revisit these thoughts, alongside a further inquiry into “diseases of the intellect.” The time seems ripe.
