Today we conclude our first white paper series, derived from the 2024 Difficulties of Technology seminar, with Modules 8 – Technology and the Whole Person and 9 – Consensus on Artificial Intelligence. These papers address the principal and characteristic harm of poorly designed, developed, and implemented technology—namely, its fragmentation of the human person—and the specific dangers posed by “Artificial Intelligence”.
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White Papers
The Conception of Technology
Technology is not merely a neutral tool but a specifying extension of human rationality that reshapes the conditions under which judgment and action occur. Its dangers arise not from misuse alone, but from its intrinsic tendency to reorder human faculties and environments.
Technology and the Psyche
Investigating how technological systems act upon the psyche prior to conscious choice, conditioning attention, memory, and habit in ways that fragment the psyche. The central harm is not distractedness but deformation of the capacities required for truly thinking.
Natural and Artificial Environments
Artificial environments do not simply set the locus for human activity, but specify our norms of scale, and thus possible action and the frameworks of intelligibility. When we sever the artificial from the natural, we elevate efficiency over dwelling as the aim of our habitation.
Technology of Biology and Biological Environments
Modern technological power over biological life becomes conceptually distorting when the organism–machine metaphor hardens into an ontological framework, reducing living wholes to functional parts and optimization metrics. This obscures teleology, formal unity, and the experience of well-being, and thereby undermines the virtues needed for embodied care and prudent restraint.
Culture as a System
Technological rationality becomes most authoritative at the level of culture, where it establishes “normal” and “legitimate” patterns of life rather than functioning as an evident instrument. Efficiency, scalability, predictability, and control become default standards of cultural evaluation, pressing institutions to remodel themselves accordingly—to the human detriment.
Governments and Technology
Political authority increasingly operates within a technologized rationality (prioritizing efficiency, standardization, scalability, and control) that displaces prudential judgment. Datafication, surveillance, and technologically-enabled control at flexible scales reconfigure politics away from human flourishing.
Communication, Media, Institutions, Education
Communication technologies do not merely transmit data but constitute the primary environment in which contemporary conflict now occurs, binding all the domains of technological concern into a single field. Thus, media environments are inhabited rather than used, invisibly intensifying our confusion, polarization, and struggle over meaning and its articulation.
Technology and the Whole Person
The central difficulty of modern technology is not any single device or system, but the fragmentation of the human person through disproportionate extensions of isolated powers. We therefore propose integration rather than rejection as the proper response: technology must be reordered to the flourishing of the whole person through virtue, prudence, education, and the restoration of proportion.
Consensus on Artificial Intelligence
“AI” is fundamentally a simulator of intelligence rather than intelligence properly so called, and that its deepest danger lies less in bad outputs than in reshaping human habits of thought, judgment, and self-understanding. Drawing on Thomistic psychology and Heidegger’s account of technological revealing, it argues that AI must remain subordinate to human judgment and never become the measure of truth, prudence, or the human good.
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