Navigating Our Brave New World

Are you a tech optimist or pessimist? Do you think our advancing technology—in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and space technology—will make our world better or worse? And do you think the new technologies of the last two centuries have more helped or harmed the advancement of mankind?

I’ve found that the more traditional a Catholic is, the more likely he is to answer those questions pessimistically. He’s more inclined to be skeptical of the claims coming from tech optimists that we can make a better world through man-made technology. We see this skepticism particularly in the “back to the land” movement that has grown popular among a certain segment of Catholics in recent years.

I spent the first fifteen years of my career as a software developer, and my start coincided with the internet revolution of the 1990s. So I’ve heard many promises of a tech utopia, and how new technologies will “change the world” (an apparently mandatory phrase in every tech CEO’s company pitch). There’s no question that technology has changed the world, particularly in the last three decades—but has that change been for the better?

Recently Vice President J.D. Vance addressed some of those issues in an insightful speech given to a summit of technology leaders. Vance tackles one of the biggest concerns of advancing technology: how it impacts the workforce.

Since the days of the Luddite movement of the early 19th century, people have worried that new technology will replace their jobs. For 200 years it has been mostly blue-collar workers, whose jobs demand physical labor and thus are most easily replaced by technology, who have been at the forefront of the anti-technology movement. But since the advent of AI, knowledge workers (like me) have cause for concern. Will Crisis Magazine one day be essentially run by AI? Will AI write and edit the articles? For all I know, some of the articles already submitted and published by Crisis were written primarily by AI. (While writing this piece, I used the AI agent Grok four times to assist me—and just six months ago I never used AI tools. But Grok is far more efficient than a Google search. I also used Grok to generate the image used with this article.)

Vance addresses these concerns adeptly, and he goes deeper than the standard answer, “New Technology just transfers jobs to other, better, industries.” I encourage you to read his speech. However, even though he quotes Pope John Paul II, Vance focuses only on economic issues; he doesn’t address cultural and spiritual issues that arise from new technology tools. Yet these are issues that Catholics need to be contemplating.

When we take a step back we can see how transformative new technologies have been just in the past three decades. The internet, social media, and then the smartphone have radically changed life as we know it in our society. Younger people today don’t realize how different things were before everyone was always connected and had what amounts to a supercomputer in their pockets. 

How exactly do we quantify this transformation? Has it been a net benefit or net negative for our culture? It’s hard to judge. The severe reduction of actual direct interactions with other people has clearly had an unfavorable impact on most of us, and studies have shown an increase in loneliness associated with smartphone usage. Furthermore, recently an article in the Financial Times (paywalled) indicated that cognitive skills in teens and young adults have been sharply declining, with the main culprit being the smartphone.

These are disturbing trends, to be sure, but the biggest concern for Catholics should be the spiritual impact of advancing technology. For years I’ve studied the numbers regarding the practice of Catholicism in America, and I’ve noticed a huge drop in the practice of the faith starting at the turn of millennium and especially among young people—right when internet usage was exploding. I strongly suspect that there’s a direct connection between those two things, but I admit I have no hard data to support that claim. My contention is that in many ways the internet—and particularly social media—has replaced the local church as a source for community and for answers to life’s biggest questions. The advent of AI “companions” could further accelerate an already alarming trend.

After mentioning all these concerns, it might surprise the reader to know that I still consider myself a “tech optimist”; or, at least, I lean more toward optimism on the spectrum between utopia and dystopia. I don’t think technology can bring about an earthly utopia (the fatal conceit of my favorite childhood show, Star Trek), but at the same time I believe the Catholic Faith and an authentic Catholic culture can thrive in a future technology-driven world.

For example, I’m amazed at how many people I’ve met who have become Catholic or returned to the practice of the Faith through finding Catholic content online. I know a young lady who decided during Covid lockdowns to research online which religion was the true religion, and ended up becoming Catholic and joining a Catholic religious order! I’m amazed at how many people I’ve met who have become Catholic or returned to the practice of the Faith through finding Catholic content online.Tweet This

In an ironic twist, the rise of the traditional Catholic movement in America has been primarily driven by the internet. Back in the 1980s the vast majority of Catholics had completely forgotten about the TLM, and there was no easy way to make it more known, what with all the powers-that-be in the Church opposed to it. You practically had to know a secret password to find someone who might tell you more about traditional Catholicism. But today you can’t even dip your toe into the waters of Catholic social media without encountering devotees of the ancient Mass and other traditional practices of the Faith.

And not to toot the Crisis horn too much, but I regularly meet people who tell me that Crisis helped them with their practice of the Faith during this tumultuous time in the Church’s history, and of course Crisis Magazine lives entirely on the internet. I wouldn’t be doing this internet-based job if I didn’t think it was a net benefit to souls. Modern technology is a dangerous tool, to be sure, but it’s a tool that can also be wielded for the Lord.

So, are you a tech optimist or a tech pessimist? I honestly appreciate both sides of this debate. But ultimately, here’s the reality: we can’t stop the advancement of technology. Barring a catastrophic event that destroys our electric grid worldwide, the juggernaut that is advancing tech will not be slowed down. So how should Catholics adapt to this world?

One option is escapism. This choice is often derided, but I think it is a legitimate one for some people. In many ways I admire the almost Amish trend of Catholics returning to the land, and I do not begrudge in any way those who are choosing this lifestyle. I hope the movement grows and flourishes. But like the Amish, back-to-the land proponents will never become mainstream; their movement will always consist of a small segment of the (already small) faithful Catholic population.

Most Catholics need to work to integrate new technologies in such a way that they don’t harm true human and spiritual development. We need to make technology our servant rather than our master (and if you are looking at your phone screen more than seven hours a day—as the average American does—then I think I know who is the master in that relationship). We need to be serious about the impact of technology on our ability to think and to interact with others.

The biggest emotional and spiritual dangers connected to new technology is when it’s used not to replace older tools or older work processes but to replace human interaction.¹ We’ve seen that with social media and smartphones, and even grocery store self-checkouts, but the danger is even greater with AI, which mimics distinctly human behavior.

Even though I’ve come to appreciate the value of AI as an aid in my own work, I still have deep concerns. These concerns are not a Terminator-style apocalypse where an AI bot takes over the world, but instead a future in which people replace human companionship with AI-robotic companions. Spending one’s day primarily interacting with a human-like robot designed to please you and follow your every command is a recipe for emotional and spiritual disaster. Robots might be able to replace humans on the factory line, but they shouldn’t replace humans at the dinner table (or in the bedroom, which we all know is one of the goals of a subset of AI-robotic makers).

To be clear, I don’t have definitive answers for how we Catholics should proceed in this brave new world, and neither does anyone else, even if they claim to have them. I do know that we must be intentional in how we accept and use new technologies; we can’t just assume every new technology is a net benefit. There may come a point when Catholics will need to reject a new “advancement,” no matter how popular it might be (such as Catholics should have already rejected IVF, for example).

Catholics should also go beyond intentional, and be incarnational. God became man, not a robot, and so we must never detach ourselves from the physical world around us. We need to “touch grass,” as the saying goes. Don’t get lost completely in the virtual world. I’ve personally seen too many Catholic public figures who went down a spiritually dark path when their world became dominated by social media interactions. No technology can replace genuine, “in real life”, human contact.

As the line between humanity and technology threatens to become more and more blurred in the eyes of many, Catholics need to be on the forefront of keeping that line clear and distinct. In the end, technology might make the world a better place to live, but by itself it can’t get anyone to heaven. To do that, we need to live intentional, incarnational lives.

1. I haven’t even mentioned forms of transhumanism, in which robotics and AI are integrated into human bodies. Anything that directly connects the human brain with a remote computer is terrifying, to be honest.