The Pope is right about my industry – AI, technology, progress and time management

magine a priest somewhere in Ireland sitting at his kitchen table tonight with a laptop open in front of him. He has several parishes to look after, and this week there have been funerals, sick calls, meetings and all the ordinary demands of parish life. There is also administration to complete, correspondence to answer and reports that cannot simply be ignored. Tomorrow morning he could visit the hospital. Instead, much of it may disappear into paperwork.

He did not enter the seminary to do this. Nobody did.

I run a company that builds artificial intelligence systems, so you might reasonably expect the next paragraph to explain how AI can solve this problem. It won’t. I should also state the obvious. I have a commercial interest in artificial intelligence. I build these systems for a living, and readers are entitled to weigh what follows with that in mind. But that is also why Pope Leo XIV’s warnings about my industry have struck me so forcefully.

 

Safeguarding

In May, he published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. In its discussion of work, Leo confronts one of the central promises made by the AI industry: that machines will take over mundane tasks, make us more productive and free human beings for better things. Yet he warns that the opposite can happen. Rather than machines being designed around human beings, human beings can find themselves adapting to the speed and demands of machines.

I recognise what he is describing. I have watched organisations introduce automation with the stated intention of freeing their people from repetitive work, only for the hours saved to be quietly absorbed into greater productivity. The work gets done faster, so more work is added. Nobody necessarily decides that this should happen. Efficiency simply becomes the measure of success.

That raises what I increasingly believe is the most important question Christians should ask about artificial intelligence. Not whether AI is good or bad. Not whether Catholics should use ChatGPT. Not whether a parish should automate its administration. Simply: who is serving whom?

Preaching involves sharing faith, and a machine, he said, ‘will never be able to share the faith’”

Pope Leo gave us part of the answer earlier this year when speaking to the clergy of Rome. He cautioned priests against using artificial intelligence to prepare their homilies. His objection was not merely that AI might produce a poor homily. It went much deeper. Preaching involves sharing faith, and a machine, he said, “will never be able to share the faith”. He also compared intelligence to a muscle that weakens when it is not exercised.

 

Distinction

Take those observations seriously and a useful distinction begins to emerge. Some things are not tasks surrounding the human encounter. They are the encounter. The homily is the encounter. Sitting beside the hospital bed is the encounter. Listening to a bereaved family, or to somebody who is lonely, is the encounter. Prayer is an encounter. These are not inefficiencies waiting to be automated. In most cases, they are precisely what all the efficiency is supposed to make room for.

This distinction did not begin with artificial intelligence. In 2011, Benedict XVI warned that virtual contact ‘cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact’”

The parish rota is a different matter, as are cemetery records, routine administration and much of the paperwork surrounding parish life. They are necessary, but they are scaffolding – and the purpose of scaffolding is to support the building, not to become the building.

This distinction did not begin with artificial intelligence. In 2011, Benedict XVI warned that virtual contact “cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact”. Two years later, writing again about the digital world, he described the proper progression beautifully: information becoming genuine communication, links ripening into friendships and connections facilitating communion. Pope Francis expressed the principle even more directly in 2019, saying that the Church had sought to promote the internet “in the service of the encounter between persons”.

Test

That is an important Catholic test for technology. Does it lead us towards deeper human encounter, or quietly become a substitute for it? Artificial intelligence raises the stakes because this technology does not merely connect us. Increasingly, it can write, analyse, decide and act on our behalf. That makes the question of what we hand over considerably more serious.

I see this in my own work. Part of what we do involves AI systems that answer routine telephone calls for healthcare practices, and the argument for them sounds compelling: take the ringing telephone away from the receptionist and give that person more time for the patient standing in front of them. Sometimes that is exactly what happens.

For an elderly person who may have spoken to almost nobody else that day, those extra ninety seconds of human contact can matter enormously”

Think about the last time you stood at a busy reception desk while the telephone rang behind it. You probably shortened what you were going to say. You became conscious of the queue. You performed being no trouble. Perhaps there is something particularly Irish in that instinct. We have a deep reluctance to make a fuss or put somebody out. We apologise for taking up someone’s time before we have even taken it. Faced with a harried receptionist and a ringing telephone, many of us instinctively make ourselves smaller. For an elderly person who may have spoken to almost nobody else that day, those extra ninety seconds of human contact can matter enormously. If technology removes the interruption and hands those seconds back, it has done something worthwhile.

 

Outcome

But I have also seen the other outcome. The AI frees the receptionist’s time, management notices that new capacity has appeared, and another task is added. Then another. The receptionist does not spend more time with patients. The practice simply processes more work. Same technology. Opposite result. The difference is not the sophistication of the machine. It is what the human beings responsible for it decided the saved time was for.

And that question does not only apply to employers. It applies to us. Many of us are already allowing artificial intelligence into small corners of our lives almost without noticing. We ask it to summarise something we could have read, draft an email we could have written, or explain an argument before we have struggled with the argument ourselves. Each decision seems harmless, and usually it is. But convenience has a peculiar ability to become dependency without ever announcing the moment at which the change occurred.

A wise man once gave me an unusual piece of advice about watching films. When a film ends, he said, we should ask what the director was trying to tell us rather than simply saying, “That was good.” His phrase has stayed with me:

‘Either we eat the movie, or the movie eats us.’

We can actively digest what we consume, examine it, question it and decide what we think of it. Or we can remain passive and allow it to work upon us.

Artificial intelligence deserves the same scrutiny. If I let a machine summarise difficult ideas for me because thinking through them takes effort, am I using AI or slowly surrendering something to it? If it saves me thirty minutes writing emails and I immediately fill those thirty minutes with more email, what exactly has been liberated? If a parish automates three hours of administration each week and those three hours become another meeting, can we honestly say technology has given the priest anything back?

Is it helping me to think, or saving me from thinking? Is it removing something tedious, or something through which I actually ought to struggle?

Catholics already possess a practice remarkably well suited to this problem. At the end of the day, in the examination of conscience, we look back over our actions, relationships and failures. We examine habits which, insignificant on their own, may gradually be shaping the kind of person we are becoming. Perhaps we need something similar for our dealings with artificial intelligence. Not fear of it. Not rejection of it. An examination of it.

What have I handed over to the machine, and why? Is it helping me to think, or saving me from thinking? Is it removing something tedious, or something through which I actually ought to struggle? And above all, what am I doing with the time it gives back? More time with my children? More attention to the person sitting across from me? More time in prayer? A visit to somebody who is lonely? An hour given to somebody who needs it? Or merely more output?

Progress

That may be a better measure of technological progress than the number of tasks we can automate. The Church does not need to become the most technologically advanced institution in society. It needs to remain one of the places that remembers what technology is for.

The priest at the kitchen table does not need a miracle from my industry. If a machine can give him Thursday morning back, good. But somebody needs to decide in advance that Thursday morning belongs to the hospital, before efficiency finds something else for him to do.

We may discover that we did not make the machine serve us at all. We simply learned to serve it more efficiently”

And perhaps that suggests a simple rule that every parish council, school, healthcare practice – and every one of us personally – could adopt. Before handing a task to AI, decide what the time being saved is for. Then come back later and ask whether the time actually went there. If three hours of parish administration are automated so that a priest can spend three more hours visiting the sick, ask whether that happened. If AI saves us thirty minutes in our own working day, ask where those thirty minutes went. Otherwise, we may discover that we did not make the machine serve us at all. We simply learned to serve it more efficiently.

So perhaps the question all of us should be asking as AI moves further into our lives is not simply: How much time can this save me?

But: If it gives me an hour back, who gets the hour?

 

Sean Higgins is CEO of ViveoAI, which develops artificial intelligence systems for healthcare, and holds a master’s degree in digital media communication.