I recently had the pleasure of having an ecumenical conversation with Brent Macon and Rev. Tony Sundermeier on their brand new podcast, The New Garden. In the episode, we discussed the pertinent questions arising in many Christian and secular circles as technology rapidly advances in the present-day Fourth Industrial Revolution.
We talked about how church leaders should navigate ethical and privacy concerns when using predictive algorithms or data analytics on collected data of their parishioners, where the line is drawn between using big data machine learning solutions for helpful insight or invasive surveillance, and ultimately how God’s divine omniscience differs from deep learning algorithms which are “artificial” notions of human efficiency.
FoAs a full-time data and artificial intelligence cybersecurity professional in the consulting industry, I see how some enterprise scale applications of Data & AI solutions are positively reinventing the landscape of many organizations in health care and public service spaces. However, I am also aware and growing increasingly concerned by how the generative “AI boom,” fueled in large part by OpenAI and other Silicon Valley competitors’ genAI agents, have been posing new social and moral problems in schools and among children and teenagers in particular.
The first main thing to realize is how valuable our personally identifiable information is. The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) produced a hit documentary that I watched on Netflix in 2020 called The Social Dilemma. In it, former Google employee and CHT founder Tristan Harris chronicles his discovery of how his former employer and other large social media companies’ platforms are negatively affecting the mental health of its users, especially girls who suffer from body dysmorphia as a result of online usage.
What was chilling was how many of his colleagues responded enthusiastically about the concerns he initially raised. But then it was business as usual, and people largely moved on. This is emblematic of what is called “the attention economy,” the multi-trillion-dollar global enterprise linking the largest social media platforms with the Mammon that is the global hyper-consumerism ad revenue marketplace apparatus, and the billions of users’ personal data on which it runs.
Right now, these companies have what is essentially a “digital twin” of exactly everything about you. Your age, location, sex, religious and political affiliation, search engine history, and perhaps what your daily conversations on and with technology, which may or may not be private.
Because ad companies can run their machine learning algorithms based on billions of lines of data about your digital “you” and hundreds of billions of online users like you, they are able to use deep learning algorithms to accurately predict the goods and services that you may be interested in purchasing. Or the digital social media content that is most likely to keep you scrolling, commenting, reposting, and sharing—regardless of if it is tearing the fabric of our society apart with higher levels of polarization and division that we have ever seen before.
These platforms can and are selling “impressions” of what is algorithmically certain to keep you most engaged to the highest bidder in the ad marketplace and they as our youth are living so much of their lives online on these addictive platforms, they are included as well. Some of the former Silicon Valley employees in the documentary admitted that they would never let their own children use the very platforms that they worked on.
Because ad companies can run their machine learning algorithms based on billions of lines of data about your digital “you” and hundreds of billions of online users like you, they are able to use deep learning algorithms to accurately predict the goods and services that you may be interested in purchasing, or the digital social media content that is most likely to keep you scrolling, commenting, reposting, and sharing—regardless of if it is tearing the fabric of our society apart with higher levels of polarization and division that we have ever seen before.
As Christians our worldview is centered on the infinite dignity of the human person made in the image and likeness of God. We are creatures built for community, sacrifice, co-responsibility, and empathy whereas the rise of Surveillance Capitalism, as coined by Shoshanna Zuboff, is largely perverting our dignity in the datafication of the human person and commodification of our attention, regardless of the proven effectives on our mental health and privation of human connection in the real world.
For this reason, in the aforementioned podcast episode we explored the philosophical right to privacy of our data based on these premises. This will become an even more important public conversation as innovations progress towards brain-computer interfaces (BCI) like Neuralink.
In her book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University professor Nita Farahany warns of a possible near future where governments could leverage advanced surveillance tools akin to the 2002 Steven Spielberg film The Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character navigates an Orwellian high-surveillance state that arrests people who have yet to commit a crime based on the high statistical likelihood of its citizens’ neuro-data.
In my own faith and formation journey with the Order of Secular Franciscans, what has been most hopeful and encouraging is seeing how much the Good News that Christ and his Church have spread to all corners of the earth has to offer in the face of these pressing societal challenges.
From the encyclical Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century as an integral systematic precursor to modern Catholic Social Teaching, to the lasting witness of hundreds of thousands of lay and religious Catholics who boldly profess or vow to live in accordance with the Gospel in the footsteps of Francis and Clare of Assisi, we are able to show the technocratic world an alternative path and a way forward.
Whether one chooses to partake in a local economic co-operative like The Economy of Francesco, or educate oneself about the impacts of our micro and macroeconomic spending power and how that repercussions it has the global marketplace, our individual choices matter by commission and omission. We each have a say in the direction our world moves. God may even be calling us to discern a more radical witness to our peers in our workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods where we have an integral part to play in building the reign of God on earth as it is in heaven.
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