The dangers of AI in a decadent society
It’s hard to imagine Dante asking ChatGPT “Help me design a nine-part structure of Hell.”
I’m afraid AI will make us lose our ability to think deeply and keep our culture in a permanent state of decadence.
Most people in the West feel an uncanny sense that our society is in decay. In his 2020 book, The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat gives words to this malaise. He calls our society “decadent” – successful but stuck. Our institutions, politics, economy, and even our entertainment are no longer seeking to go beyond themselves and improve.
Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas warns that artificial intelligence – despite the optimistic prophecies of its architects – may be forcing us into a state of permanent decadence. If we heed his words, we might escape it.
Our society is stuck in a self-referential loop. Every year, the Oscars insist that movies are groundbreaking when they are telling the same stories and reinforcing the same cultural narratives. Our political discourse keeps appealing to the same handful of historical events – civil rights, the Civil War, slavery, World War II – as if nothing else has happened in a century. Our institutions, including universities and even churches, have stopped producing great minds at the volume they once did…