This article was written in response to Sohrab Ahmari’s “Escaping the ‘Torment Nexus.’” You can find the original article and all four responses here.

Sohrab Ahmari observes that “openness to AI’s positive possibilities is deeply congruent with biblical faith” and resonant with the post–Vatican II Church’s “mature reflection on technological modernity.” Pope Leo XIV, he notes, has lauded AI’s potential to open “new horizons” that enhance “research in health care and scientific discovery.”

The pope is right. For instance, AI recently helped a young man discover a novel cure for a hard-to-diagnose disease that nearly killed him and, according to The Pennsylvania Gazette, he is now using “AI tools to identify possible matches between the world’s 18,500 or so recognized diseases—less than a quarter of which have FDA-approved treatments—and some 4,000 drugs.” Likewise, AI is powering promising pediatric cancer research that mines, standardizes, and shares data on every child diagnosed with cancer in the United States.

In fact, AI’s “positive possibilities” are many, diverse, and extend beyond health care. For instance, AI is helping boost Hispanic homeownership by reducing language barriers and making the search for an affordable home with a low-rate mortgage much easier. And AI has also proven itself  a tool to help businesses find nonobvious ways to survive and thrive during market downturns.

But, as Ahmari also notes, Pope Leo XIV has expressed concerns regarding AI’s potential to undermine “humanity’s openness to truth and beauty” and confound “our distinctive ability to grasp and process reality.” Moreover, he adds, the Curia’s “most systematic treatment” of AI to date highlights how “AI could consolidate the power of a handful of corporations; rob workers of their skills…lead to massive job losses; and, ultimately, diminish the very notion of human intelligence and creativity.”

So, just how should Leonine Christian Democrats think about AI, and what, if anything, can and should they do about it? Ahmari answers by citing a principle proclaimed in Gaudium et spes; namely, that the “order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around.” That Vatican II teaching, he avers, beckons us “to carefully discern where AI and expansive automation belong, and where they don’t.”

Amen. But I’m afraid that it’s already too late to suppose that we are in any position to weigh AI’s positive possibilities against its negative repercussions, discern where to let it in and where to keep it out, and expect that we can then—in accordance with our moral and prudential reasoning—predictably and reliably exercise meaningful control over AI’s nonstop proliferation and negative consequences.

AI is already very nearly in the saddle riding us. Start with the threat that not even the technology’s biggest boosters deny—namely, AI’s insatiable appetite for electricity and water. Writing in The National Interest, Ismael Arciniegas Rueda and Robin Wang claim that the electricity needed to power AI could “exceed the net energy capacity in the U.S. power grid by 2030.” In 2023, a report in Scientific American explained:

Every online interaction relies on a scaffolding of information stored in remote servers—and those machines, stacked together in data centers worldwide, require a lot of energy…. A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption…would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.

Cooling hot servers in AI data centers requires immense amounts of water. It has been reported by Bloomberg News that about two-thirds of data centers built since 2022 are in areas “gripped by high levels of water stress” and are rapidly “draining water from areas that need it most.” Notably, the European Union recently passed legislation requiring AI data centers to report their annual freshwater consumption. But here in America, attempts to regulate AI have routinely been brushed back, even as electricity costs to average consumers have soared as much as 267 percent in areas near AI data centers.

Essentially, up until now, both the technology’s well-meaning prophets and its profiteers, propagandists, and political puppets have escaped accountability by promising that universally beneficial and low-or-no-cost AI breakthroughs and bonanzas are just around the corner. Their corollary canard has been that, regardless, the only real cure for present or potential AI ills or evils is (you guessed it) more AI.

But those assertions are finally beginning to wear thin. Every day there are more stories about people, including children as young as eight, being harmed, sexualized, or traumatized by AI “chatbot friends” or porn “companions,” along with stories documenting how easy it is for AI to generate and disseminate dangerous and malicious disinformation via real-looking AI-generated videos and images. Likewise, each day now brings more stories about how AI is starting to hit human labor like a category-five hurricane. For instance, The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the “wake-up call” issued by Walmart’s CEO, who warned that the technology will soon wipe out many jobs and radically change the workforce. 

AI not only poses grave risks to human well-being and human labor but to humanity itself. The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative now lists “catastrophic accidents/misuse and other risks” related to AI alongside nuclear war, pandemics, bioterrorism, and climate change as a prominent example of “existential risks” to humanity.

Of course, not everyone agrees with that assessment. For instance, in a book published last year titled AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, two Princeton University computer scientists argued that AI is not “an existential risk.” But to their credit, they also argued that, existential threat or not, “we should be…worried about what people will do with AI,” especially if “AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.”

Right. In 2023, more than 1,100 AI experts, including some veterans of those “largely unaccountable big-tech companies,” signed an open letter warning that AI poses grave risks and prescribing a six-month moratorium on its development. In September, two signatories of that letter, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, released a book with the highly provocative title If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. AI, they argue, could literally kill us, either by intention or by accident, and it could do so after killing our jobs, enriching its all-too-human hucksters, toying with our primal love-hate emotions, and trifling with our health. Yudkowsky and Soares seek to “lay the groundwork for treaties that shut down any and all AI research and development that could result in superintelligence.” Shortly after the book’s release, Soares was on Capitol Hill trying to persuade federal legislators to take AI’s grave and diverse threats seriously. He got a hearing, which he might not have gotten last year before stories like the ones I referenced earlier began proliferating daily. But this David was up against Silicon Valley’s $200 million pro-AI super PAC and many other AI Goliaths.

What, one wonders, would Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, say about AI’s threats to human well-being, human labor, and humanity itself? Well, why not just ask AI? I did. Here is a tiny sample of what DuckDuckGo AI answered within ten seconds:

Pope Leo XIII…would likely…focus on ethical considerations, social equity, and the common good…. This could include promoting policies that protect jobs…[and] ensure that AI benefits society as a whole, rather than concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few.

Now, that’s pretty good, but wouldn’t it be even better if we could ask Pope Leo XIII, who has been dead for more than 122 years, himself? Well, stick around! Given sufficient original or CGI-crafted photos, recordings, videos, and writings (including ones that might be expressly made by a living person for that future purpose), it will soon be child’s play to generate a seems-realer-than-real uber-avatar for a deceased pope, politician, parent, or other person one might wish to “resurrect.”

You could dial up the deceased on your screen each morning or at any given moment of any given day and “talk to,” “be with,” and “learn from” them. The real-as-can-be-except-not-really-real person could engage in all sorts of dialogue; express heartfelt emotions (“I sure do miss you, Mom!”; “I miss you too, sweetheart!”); give and take a nuanced joke; remember what you chatted about the other day, week, month, or year; and even share its opinions and insights about whether AI poses an existential threat to humanity. We already have AI-generated “actors” and “characters” that are proficient and real enough to have Hollywood’s guilds and filmmakers up in arms. (Can the Black Friday “two uber-avatar AI immortals for the price of one” sale be far behind?)

AI is an existential threat; and it’s not so much “snake oil” as a snake in the garden, a diabolical whisperer promising to give us everything we think we want; making us not just clever creatures but pseudocreators; and perverting, corrupting, and capturing hearts and minds that long to be the Creator, one who can dial up digital immortality for others and plan to “resurrect” oneself. What C. S. Lewis preached about how to respond to the very real threat of nuclear war applies to the very real threat of AI:

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of cards.

In the end, for all its many current and potential benefits, AI is the ultimate Faustian bargain, a satanically seductive technology that is almost impossible to resist. It can only be cauterized, contained, conquered, and made “subordinate to the order of persons” if we commit ourselves not only to “doing sensible and human things,” but doing them to the extent possible (and the “extent possible” is rapidly shrinking) unaided by it, unresponsive to it, and unwilling to yield more to it than we have already yielded.

Led by Pope Leo XIV—a pope in the flesh, able to recall the smell of real coffee brewing at a Wawa located down the road from Villanova University, a place where he spent time with real people on a real campus when he was a member of that real human community—Leonine Christian Democrats should resist AI. And as we resist, may God grant that we be mindful and critical, but also that we “be not afraid” (Luke 2:10).