Trend Tuesday: When the Pope writes about AI, you know: AI has left the lab
Art by @basilonmypizza: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN - https://basilhefti.ch/
As a child, I loved building towers with wooden blocks (even more so with a system called Cuboro, where the aim is to build a marble run). The first instinct: higher is better. Until your tower starts to wobble. What I learned: sometimes, the foundation is so skewed that there is only one solution - restart from scratch.
In other words: the foundation matters.
A week ago, the Pope formulated the church's view on AI in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. His central claim: AI must not be equated with human intelligence. It imitates human intelligence, often surpassing humans in speed and computational capacity, yet does not understand what it produces.
That the Pope writes about AI is noteworthy. Encyclicals respond to forces that are reshaping daily life (examples are: Rerum Novarum to industrialization, Laudato Si' to the climate crisis). Now we know: AI has left the lab.
In practical terms, the Pope warns about excessive reliance on AI, calls for digital sobriety (the skill to know when not to use AI), and stresses that consequential decisions should not be fully handed over to AI.
His litmus test: does AI make human life more human? A tool that frees the nurse to spend more time at the bedside passes; a system that simply outputs "approved/denied" for us to click through without thinking fails. If yes: embrace it responsibly. If power grows and human judgment withers: you are building a tower that will wobble.
In other words, he requests a solid foundation.
This ties in well with what I consider best practices when employing AI, in particular agentic systems, as described for example in the Workflow Wednesday series (Defining the Playing Field for AI Agents, Fallback Is a Capability, Circuit Breakers for Agentic AI).
Best practices like these form the foundation that keeps the tower standing. Higher is not better. Stable is better.
So - how do you notice the foundation slipping?
• Art: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN https://basilhefti.ch/
• https://lnkd.in/eSXE39Yg
