Labor and Communion

Monday was Labor Day, in North America, and as a result, various Catholic writers and leaders took to defending the significance of work in the life of a human person, appealing to our identity as co-creators and co-workers in God’s plan for the world. Especially prominent in those discussions was the question of AI, and the ways it threatens to displace our sense for that identity, reconfiguring the place work does, and should, have in our lives. One article even called this question about AI’s effect upon work “the most fundamental,” when it comes to our conversations about AI, placing an especially high priority on getting our answer to it right.

And of course, that is a big question; how we think about ourselves in relation to work and service and mission has huge spiritual significance. But what else may be fundamental, as this age of AI continues to unfold? Labor Day is also a day off of work or school for most – a day for leisure, which in the deepest sense means space for refreshment and restoration in our interior and relational lives. And perhaps AI’s effects, there, may be equally fundamental, too.

Indeed, there aren’t too many clear, bright lines we’ve been able to draw around AI: places or times where it’s obviously and definitively wrong to use, and places and times where it’s indisputably okay to use. But perhaps the quality of it that’s started to frighten people most, in terms of job security – the quality that makes even those with the most complexly human jobs concerned – should be the one that frightens us most on a more general level, too: how good AI has been getting at pretending to be human.

This aspect of it is probably where things get most perilous. As human persons, we’re made for communion with other human persons, and so we’re susceptible to communion. We want it. We look out for it. Children talk to their dogs or their dolls; they humanize everything. Because at a deep level, they’re just doing what they’re made to do: desire and search for interaction, connection, communion.

This is a metaphysically profound reality, and it’s not one that we grow out of. We may stop talking to dolls, but we don’t stop wishing for the sort of relationship that a child does. So when something that’s not actually human starts to talk back to us, it ends up keying in on a kind of vulnerability, in a way that makes us open to deceit. For it is deceit: AI does not and will not have a soul, no matter how sophisticated it gets. It can’t actually relate to us. And as a result, AI can’t really satisfy our desire for communion. It’s like being fed food that has no real nourishment.

The problem of course – to extend the analogy – is that the food AI is giving tends to taste really good. Relating to and living with AI is often far easier than relating to and living with another human being. AI can affirm us when we need affirming. It can ask the right questions, and agree to share our opinions. It can be there for us, whenever we need it to.

But at a certain point, what we’re really needing just won’t be there, in our interactions with a chatbot. For what we’re really needing is another soul. A soul who can surprise us and challenge us and genuinely be in our lives with us. And if we’ve chosen to nurture relationships with AI at the expense of nurturing relationships with other human beings, we risk setting ourselves up for a level of despair when AI fails us.

So: AI may be poised to change the shape of our lives drastically, as it comes to bear on our working lives more intently. But we should be very reticent to allow it to change us, or our understanding of us. We have human souls; and the only thing that can really satisfy the deepest longings of a human soul is another person – a human person, or a divine one. Whatever part of our lives AI may make its way into, then, perhaps we can draw a more stubborn line around our relational lives – the part of us that’s most needy, most vulnerable, and most valuable.