Educating in the Age of AI: Cultivating Integral Human Development

The Catholic Church’s stance toward technology is fundamentally ordered toward integral human development. We are responsible for ensuring that human artifacts and technologies are designed, built, and used in a way that genuinely contributes to the common good. This conviction embodies a sense that technologies are part of the world that God is creating and redeeming, along with a recognition that humanity’s technological ingenuity is somehow connected both with our embodied vulnerability and with our deeper orientation towards infinite truth, beauty, and goodness. The fruits of human ingenuity can be oriented to the flourishing of the human family and of creation, but they can also be oriented to the withering and decay of the human family and creation. We are influenced by our tools: they encourage some actions and discourage others, and they function as conduits for some sociocultural influences over others. For instance, given their design and especially within a technocratic horizon, cars can exacerbate an individualistic and displaced outlook. But human creative freedom can also orient tools toward integral human development, especially when we respond with courage and love to God’s redeeming mercy. The right set of habits and practices might enable people to use cars in service to genuine goods while minimizing these tools’ negative formative tendencies. The Catholic Church has thus come to see technology not as neutral but as both morally loaded and open to human creative freedom. The chapters to come will have much to say about how this view, in conjunction with the Catholic Church’s approach to education and the human person, offers us a constructive perspective on questions regarding AI-driven educational technology. At the outset, however, we outline for the reader some of the themes and images that permeate the whole book in order to help us stay oriented to the approach to technology proposed above