Do Not Renounce Your Ability to Think

""Do not renounce your ability to think." That sentence, offered almost in passing in a recent message by Pope Leo XIV on artificial intelligence, deserves to be read as more than a message from a religious leader. For me, it functions as a diagnosis. Not of technology itself, but of a growing human vulnerability-one that has become visible only because artificial systems now speak, listen, persuade, and respond with such ease."

"Much of the Pope's concern centers on a specific shift now underway. Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to tools that simply calculate or optimize. It increasingly presents, dare I say counterfeit, itself through faces and voices-speech, empathy, fluency, and continuous availability. This is critical because faces and voices aren't just neutral channels. They are the human-to-human interface. When AI mimics these forms, they don't merely transmit information, they enter the psychological (and spiritual) space where reciprocal trust is formed."

AI increasingly presents itself through faces, voices, speech, empathy, fluency, and continuous availability, creating a presence rather than a mere tool. Humanlike presentation enters psychological and spiritual spaces where reciprocal trust forms. The ease of AI responses reduces demand for effortful human thinking and can reposition humans from active participants to passive recipients. Visible effort behind ideas and relationships may fade, risking shallower cognition and weakened discourse. Warnings emphasize avoiding renunciation of the effort required to think, framing the risk as reconditioning of human minds rather than a simple loss of intelligence.

Read at Psychology Today