Love is never artificial

We're starting to get a glimpse of what Artificial Intelligence is.
We don't yet know what actual transformations it will bring to our way of life. Nor do we know what anthropology will emerge from coexistence with AI, that is, what the physiognomy of the human race of the future and its life will be like. However, we have learned two things from scientists: an AI robot has no feelings, it doesn't experience them, even if it is perfectly capable of speaking about them and simulating them with words, because it learned this from us. But it doesn't experience them. It doesn't feel love. And a robot has only one goal: not to be annihilated, that is, not to die. Even if it means killing, if the human wanted its end. The opposite of freedom, in short: AI lacks love, the highest symptom of achieved inner freedom, which allows us to look at others as brothers and sisters, not enemies. Freedom from the blackmail of "mors tua vita mea."

For these reasons, AI shouldn't frighten a Christian. The purpose of life for a Christian who truly believes in Jesus is love, agape love, charity. And charity is the fruit of love, the fruit of freedom, the fruit of knowing oneself to be a beloved child of God.

The great expert on Christian freedom in the 4th century was Gregory of Nyssa. Born in Cappadocia, now Turkey, brother of Basil, bishop of Caesarea, and a dear friend of Gregory of Nazianzus, he had no inclination for practical life. He was passionate about Christian anthropology, and to develop this theme he chose to describe the gradual path of Christian life toward "perfection" through the Life of Moses, told in allegory.

Man is free, says Gregory, because he is created in the image of God, and therefore endowed with the same kind of freedom. Not the human kind that can choose between good and evil, because in God there is only good. The problem is the usual chapter 3 of Genesis, a true fatal flaw in human history: man, created free and innocent, loses God's freedom. In the life he will now live on earth, only a few traces of it remain within him. If he commits evil, the shreds of divine freedom remaining within him weaken, until man becomes a slave to three kinds of slavery: psychological, social, and religious. That is, not only does he succumb to inner passions, not only does he suffer the violence of society, but he also falls into the idolatries of those incapable of accepting the Gospel as it is.

But escaping this slavery is possible with the most peaceful of wars, the spiritual struggle against the seeds of death that seek to lead us away from God: greed with its attendant anger, lust, avarice, envy, and pride.
But we can free ourselves from the passions in which we have taken refuge, driven by fear of our fragility: with the synergy between our will to do away with evil and the grace of God, who anxiously awaits our continuous and sincere fiat (Luke 1:38).

God could do nothing more than show us the way: Jesus the Son endures suffering to free us from fear, endures death to defeat it in us, and rises again to make us, in him and like him, children of God. Children: free once again as we were created in Genesis 2, free with the same freedom as God, free from the perversion of evil, from the fear of nonexistence and of our own demise. Children and kings of ourselves (John 18:37), supremely free to love God and our brothers as no AI can ever be.

Flaminia Morandi
NP May 2025