Religion and education are the principal elements of our nation’s culture. Yet, there is no denying our culture has produced a self-serving political and economic elite and a general population that abjectly submits to the dictates of those who have authority over them. In short, our culture has not promoted truth as the common good. It has instead perpetuated its abuse by an elite few who keep power and wealth to themselves. To top it all, they promote a culture that makes people accept their being relegated to the seamy edges of society.
If this nation has strayed from the path to the common good, the ultimate truth of a nation’s life, how much farther away will it stray with the arrival of today’s hidden mindbenders? I’m talking about artificial intelligence (AI) that, as a pure algorithm bereft of emotion and critical thinking, is fast doing just about all the thinking for a lot of humans today.
But it’s really not AI that threatens our world as it is just a tool. The threat comes from the anonymous few that possess the resources to maintain data centers and program AI to do what they want. Pope Leo XIV, in his encyclical “Magnificent Humanity,” warns of new forms of exclusion with the use of AI. Indeed, we should worry about the dehumanizing worldview and corresponding values the data-storage owners and controllers of AI could inculcate in the minds of this and future generations.
Like what made those two minors in Tacloban kill fellow students? I’m sure their parents, teachers and priests taught them not to kill. So, why did they kill? What has technology done to insidiously distort their sense of values and made them override their biological, educational and religious elders’ teachings about the intrinsic value of human life? A recent newspaper report tells us 10 million students ask AI for advice on life-problems that trouble them. Why AI? Where are the parents, the educators and the priests?
If all we do is lower the age of criminal liability of minors and/or revise the school curriculum just to improve students’ scores in reading and comprehension, we are badly missing the point. Instead, how about considering a law that makes parents liable for the misconduct of minors under their care? And how about letting teachers act as parents while minors are at school instead of castigating them for disciplining minors? After all, parents are the ones that spoil minors often at the expense of terrified teachers.
We have our work cut out for us if we want Filipinos to make existential decisions on the basis of eternal truths like the intrinsic dignity of human beings and the common good as a nation’s fulfillment. Obviously, this is the job of parents, teachers and religious leaders, not of legislators whose minds have been bent into pursuing their ambitions at the expense of others.
It’s not too late to figure out together how we can use AI to make us more steeped in humanizing values, more positively related to other humans and all creatures and more focused on the common good. We cannot afford to have AI bend the Filipino mind farther. More than hope, let us, today’s parents, teachers and priests, be up to the challenge.