By Fr. Benedict Kiely
In 1984, as a nineteen-year-old young man, I returned after a year of testing my vocation to religious life. During that period we had been deprived, or rather liberated, from television. In my brief vacations after that, I went to Blockbuster and rented a VHS tape of a new popular movie called The Terminator.
It depicted a future world in which machines were at war with humans, and the machines—or, as we would call them today, “drones”—were killing. It was a science fiction movie. Forty-one years later, what was fantasy is now reality: drones, even the size of flies, are a primary means of warfare on many battlefields, some sophisticated and others, like those used by ISIS in the battle of Mosul, rudimentary.
Four years before that movie appeared, the then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, one of the Church’s greatest theologians in recent centuries, gave a speech at a congress in Palermo, Sicily. (Searching online for articles about this speech, I have only been able to find one, a brief piece in Aleteia in 2018, by Professor Daniel Esparza).
Among other things addressed by the Church’s doctrinal guardian, Ratzinger discussed the seemingly esoteric meaning of the description of the “Beast” in the book of Revelation (13:18), particularly the name of the Beast, or rather the number, “666”.
This topic, normally relegated to the margins of religion or to the unpublished theses of the mentally unstable, in this almost unknown address by Cardinal Ratzinger may be one of the most important—and prophetic—speeches as an anticipation of the world unfolding at high speed in the full 21st century.
Something similar to The Terminator: the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1980 was pure fantasy, and warnings about the danger of “the machine” seemed to belong to the ravings of a madhouse.
However, drawing on the experience of the Nazi concentration camps, Ratzinger said that there “faces and history were canceled, transforming man into a number, reducing him to a piece in a huge machine.”
And he continued, warning of future dangers looming:
“Man must be interpreted by a computer, and this is only possible if he is translated into numbers. The Beast is a number and transforms into numbers. God, on the other hand, has a name and calls by name. He is person and seeks the person.”
Many years earlier, Fr. Romano Guardini, a theologian of great influence on Joseph Ratzinger’s thought, spoke of the dangers unleashed by the post-nuclear era, but which apply just as much, if not more, to the AI era:
“At the center of the efforts of the coming culture will rise this problem of power. Its solution will remain crucial. Every decision that the future era faces—those that determine the well-being or misery of humanity and those that determine the life and death of humanity itself—will be decisions centered on the problem of power. Although it will increase automatically with the passage of time, the concern will not be its increase, but first the containment and then the correct use of power.”
From the beginning, in the Garden, when humanity was assured by the Father of Lies, in whom—as the Lord said—there was no truth, that we could be “like God,” fallen man seems incapable of caution and moderation.
This is not the 21st-century equivalent of Lord Ned Ludd’s machine-destroying followers, although that will be the accusation from those determined to advance with the “inevitable” future of AI. The Beast, the number, not only exists, but is of infinitely superior intelligence to ours. It knows everything about the unrestrained and improper use of power.
If one quality is needed more than any other today, it may be the gift of discernment.
In the book of Proverbs we are told: “Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, who gains understanding.” Discernment, etymologically, is much more than judging well; it includes the sense of “separating,” like the gold seeker who sifts through a lot of earth before finding a nugget. St. Paul exhorts us, in the letter to the Ephesians, to “try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.”
Ratzinger’s prophetic and extraordinary vision of the meaning of the number of the Beast, and the destructive possibilities of the machine, echoes much earlier words from another prophet, G.K. Chesterton. He said that “the closer a man is to an ordered and classified being, the closer he is to an automaton. The closer he is to an automaton, the closer he is to a beast.”
We could even add: the closer he is to the Beast.
For Christians, the arrival and rapid development of AI have brought us to a time that will require much discernment. It may confront us with many, even some of our own, who will think that not only are we crazy, but that we are evil. If a union of the forces of evil with technology were to occur, a prophetic word, like that of Cardinal Ratzinger, will be extremely necessary.
The containment and correct use of power do not fit with what Solzhenitsyn called “the cavernous emotions of greed, envy, and lack of control.” Those emotions are not restricted to the cave; they feel very much at home in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street.
Discernment is not a gift given nor easily obtained; it must be worked for and conquered. That will require effort and, ultimately, perhaps only the Church can provide the necessary means.
A sign of encouragement and hope in these times: both with the choice of his name and with several statements he has already made, Pope Leo has identified AI (rumored to be the theme of his first encyclical) as a challenge for the Church, and a danger to “human dignity, justice, and work.”
About the author:
Fr. Benedict Kiely is a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. He is the founder of Nasarean.org, which helps persecuted Christians.