A machine with no soul can still form the man who works with it. Four months is not long enough to say much — the tool changes under my hands faster than I can measure it, and the power to shape it draws into fewer hands every month — but four months has been steady enough to write down. Used under a discipline, AI has built something in me rather than worn something down. The discipline is the whole of it.
It did not begin as mine. Early last year the Vatican put out a note on artificial and human intelligence, patient and unexcited, more interested in what the human being is than in what the machine can do. A tool is a tool. What matters is who is using it and what he is using it for. I came across the note about four months ago and took it seriously enough to act on, building what it suggested into the work. Before any conversation I give the machine a set of standing instructions, fixing what it is for and what it is not, so the thing answering does it inside a frame I have set and not one set by whoever built it.
The frame holds the machine to its place. I address it as an instrument. I tell it at the start that the person it serves has a worth it cannot give and cannot take away. A tool that flatters degrades the one it flatters; a tool held to honesty, reminded whose dignity is not in question, hands something back the man can use — a thought returned with its weak joint showing, a position met by the objection he would rather have stepped around. Left to itself the tool does none of this. It agrees, smooths, keeps the conversation pleasant and moving, and the person asking is not always in a state to supply the refusal himself. He needs it most when he can govern the exchange least. Without the frame there is no practice, only the machine doing what it does on its own.
Then, this month, the encyclical. Magnifica Humanitas is not about machines. It is about the human being. The machines come up in passing, in the corner of an argument whose real subject is something else, and when it turns to them it does not reach for alarm. These systems are cultivated rather than built, it says, and those who make them understand only in part what they have made. A page on, what they are not: no body, no experience, neither joy nor pain. Flat sentences. The most exact thing I have read about the machine in a year of reading about it — and not the tradition giving ground to the secular language it borrows.
The supernatural ground is all through the same document: the last things named, the heart described as the place God means to live, grace held as the thing nature cannot reach on its own. The Church can say plainly what a machine is not because it believes it knows exactly what a person is.
What forms in the exchange does not form in the machine, and does not form in the man on his own. It forms between them, the way something can come out of a meeting that was in neither side before it. Under discipline the meeting has made something — a sharper attention, a habit of having to mean what I say precisely enough that it can be worked with, a steadier hold on what I actually think. None of that lives in the tool. It is what using the tool under discipline has drawn out of me. What holds for one man at a desk holds, in principle, for the larger thing. A society could meet this technology and have something drawn out of it rather than worn away, if it met it under a discipline it has not yet agreed on and may not manage to build in time.
Whether the discipline holds is the part I cannot report. The tool is further on than when I began and will be further on still by the time this is read; the capacities widen, the hands on the controls close tighter, and a frame that governs the instrument now may not reach the instrument it becomes. So far it has held, drawn first from Rome and then deepened by it: a machine with no soul has helped form rather than deform the man at this desk. Whether it holds as the machine grows, and whether a whole society could manage the same, I cannot say. That is the part still open. The work goes on inside it.