Can technology be leveraged for the human good? Or will AI technology and its explosive expansion bring about the opposite—a culture that reduces our magnificent humanity to means for technocratic ends?
"We can either create the Tower of Babel or we can rebuild the walls of the New Jerusalem."
Brian Patrick Green has spent his career asking these difficult questions and seeking to apply ethical theory to real world technological developments. He is director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and he is co-author of "Encountering Artificial Intelligence" as well as the newly released "Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."
In this episode, Green explains the technocratic paradigm—the worldview that reduces people and the created world to raw material, data, and units of production, and sets against it what Pope Francis called a culture of encounter. He and Mark Labberton discuss the argument and impact of Pope Leo XIV's May 2026 encyclical on artificial intelligence, "Magnifica Humanitas", an uplifting moral appeal to troubled people in troubled times.
They discuss the Eucharist and the ongoing incarnation as the anchor of Catholic social teaching; how technocratic thinking distorts immigration and war from the Marshall Islands to autonomous drones in Ukraine; just war theory in an age of ever more powerful weapons; the encyclical's principles from human dignity to solidarity; and where AI genuinely serves the vulnerable in medicine, in surfacing hidden bias, and in caring for the Earth.
Episode Highlights
- "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."
- "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," that really transforms our way of viewing each other.
- "We can either create the Tower of Babel or we can rebuild the walls of the New Jerusalem.
- "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."
- "It's an encyclical about AI ostensibly, but really it's an encyclical about humanity … and what our role is here in the universe."
About Brian Patrick Green
Brian Patrick Green directs technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, where he teaches engineers to weigh the human stakes of their work. A former genetics major, he turned toward technology's social impact after a year with the Jesuit Volunteers International in the Marshall Islands, a landscape marked by nuclear testing. He earned his doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union and has focused on AI since 2016. He co-authored "Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations" and the new "Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," and advises Catholic and multi-faith AI efforts, including at the Vatican.
Helpful Links and Resources
"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, in a relational sharing of life that embraces the most vulnerable." (from "Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations", 2023)
Show Notes
- Defining applied ethics and technological ethics
- Comparing how we use technology versus the technology itself
- Marshall Islands, Jesuit Volunteers, and a genetics major's turn toward social impact
- From biotechnology to teaching ethics to engineers, and into AI around 2016
- Catholic teaching on Eucharist, communion, and an incarnation that is ongoing and physical
- Pope Francis and the "culture of encounter"
- Why the material world and every person carry a sacredness ethics must honor
- Explaining the technocratic paradigm as a cultural phenomenon and social program
- Seeing a forest as quantifiable value of lumber; or construing people as cogs, data, units of exploitation
- Wendell Berry: "There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places."
- Reducing the sacredness of human life to mere numbers
- Colonialism, nuclear testing, and islands treated as raw material
- Immigration read through a technocratic lens on both political sides
- The opposite of encounter: people as functions to move in or out
- Just war theory
- How drones and autonomous weapons turn killing into a problem of mere efficiency
- Squeezing just war criteria until war becomes nearly impossible
- Why this moral vision feels preposterous to a de-Christianized culture
- Culture of encounter, and seeing each other as images of God
- Romans 12 and the renewing of the mind—in order to transform how we see others
- Tower of Babel versus rebuilding the New Jerusalem
- Nehemiah, "synodality," and figuring things out together
- Dignity, common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice
- Culture of power versus a civilization of love, and Augustine's "City of God"
- The reach and impact of "Magnifica Humanitas", from tech workers and CEOs to UN ambassadors
- Embracing the most vulnerable as the measure of encounter
- AI that serves: medical data, de-biasing loan decisions, watching the Earth from orbit
- AI that threatens: autonomous warfare, mass surveillance, people reduced to data
- Human agency, freedom, and the choice ahead
#AIEthics #FaithAndTechnology #CatholicSocialTeaching #ArtificialIntelligence #TechnocraticParadigm #PopeLeoXIV #HumanDignity #MagnificaHumanitas #ConversingPodcast
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.
