Leadership Decanted
Curious about leaders, leading teams, or leadership? So are Paul Garcia and Kerry "KG" Butler. In fact, they turned their periodic happy hour chats about life and leadership into the Leadership Decanted Podcast. Join Paul and KG as they discuss all things leadership. Each episode of Leadership Decanted asks fascinating questions about leadership and keeps the conversation flowing over a nice bottle of wine.
Leadership Decanted
Cheeky Half Episode (41): Human dignity in the age of AI.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Paul's been reading something unexpected: Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, arguing that AI should be judged against human dignity, not efficiency. It's a genuinely different take on a topic that mostly produces unreflective panic or unquestioned evangelism.
Join Paul & KG for this Cheeky Half episode. And if you haven't yet listened to their earlier conversation on this in Cheeky Half 40, it makes a good companion listen.
Cheeky Half episodes are short. So rather than spending your precious minutes on any further explanation, we definitely encourage you to listen.
Sláinte friends!
If you are interested in a written reflection of this discussion and its themes, you can find our brief article here.
Please feel free to send us your thoughts, comments and suggestions any time by leaving us a text/voice message via the link at the top of these show notes!
Or talk to us through either of the options below.
Email: askus@leadershipdecanted.com
Website episode comments: www.leadershipdecanted.com
Disagree or agree with anything we've said? How wrong are we?!? Are there any leadership topics you'd like us to discuss, or people you'd like us to talk to? Maybe you'd like to recommend a favourite wine!
Whatever tickles your fancy, we'd love to hear from you!!
Is there some new conversation somewhere? Shout out to Pope Leo the Fourteenth. Welcome to the Leadership Decandidat and G Half Edition, where we dare to share unfinished thought and ideas around some potentially thorny leadership questions. And even though KG and I can't always be in the same room, we still do this over a glass of our favourite beverage. KG!
SPEAKER_02Oh, what is happening, man? Great to see you as always, as you and you. You know, we get to hang out again just in between our other shows, which is always nice, just to get a get a refresher. I like to get a refresher from every once in a while. Yeah, Paul refresher.
SPEAKER_00I like to get my fix if I want my cheeky half, my leadership decanted fix through the cheeky half.
SPEAKER_02Yes, it's good. It's good. Do you have anything that's going on in your world right now that we need to know about that that you want to get off your chest, Paul?
SPEAKER_00Very good question. I don't know if anyone needs to know anything that I have to say. I have been tinkering, so to speak. I have been so you know how we've recently spent some time talking about AI, and we also had a listener comment that, you know, we couldn't certainly couldn't ignore AI anymore, so we should talk more about it, which we have been kinder. A little bit. And then, you know, we had the cheeky half we with you and I, where you talked about your posts and your thoughts around AI. And just recently, I've been looking at, and I'm sure most of us have, we've been seeing a lot of AI posts that talk about AI, usually in kind of in two registers, right? First register is, oh my god, AI is coming for all our jobs. It's doomsday.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I've seen that.
SPEAKER_00And and the other register is AI is just going to help with all our productivity and all our efficiency, and it's just going to usher in a new epoch of greatness and achievement and whatever it might be. Wow. Yes. They tend to be kind of orbiting around those two broad general registers. Do you think? Or have I not? I think so.
SPEAKER_02No, no, you you've got it. And and look, there's uh always going to be some in between, but I think you've got it as far as they're generally one side or the other. And I would throw in another one, you know. Oh yes. Um, well, it's it's the I'm scared of AI thing, because I have some people in my sphere who just don't know what it's all about and what the hype's all about.
SPEAKER_00Because you know, they they're not so much that they're losing their work or their job, no, but they're just they're just generally fearful.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're just uh it's like, what is this all about? And you know, why why is it so such the conversation? Is is is it as powerful as is people say? And I'm like, oh, I really hadn't thought about that. Maybe because in our world and kind of the corporate space, it's there, it's you know, embedded, it has a life, and we really have to deal with it. But I think there's still a lot of people who just haven't really had any sense of it other than maybe a search or two that they've done. So yeah, there's still some fear.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right. So based on those sort of those registers, whenever I'm seeing posts that seek to address AI or break things down or explain, if you like, yeah, in response to some of these registers, I find extremely uninspiring. And well, yeah, yeah, it says less about the truth, right? It says less about the quality of the work than it is about maybe my own ignorance. But notwithstanding, it's a very vanilla discourse now, I think. Yeah, you keep seeing the same arguments multiple sides, you keep seeing the same logic, and it's like we're in this bubble now. We're all in this bubble. Anyone who has any investment in AI, it's like we're all kind of caught in this bubble. It feels like we're all hearing exactly the same arguments, the same things over and over again. Now, I'm not suggesting that I've read everything there is to read and and so forth, but my experience has been that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So that led me to thinking who is talking about this in a way that's totally different, in a way that is so outside my own sphere of knowledge or even comfort that I need to seek out, I need to find. Maybe they might provide some nuance or something different that cracks open for me the conversation that gives me something different to think about. So that was my question.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Is there some new conversation somewhere?
SPEAKER_00Maybe it's new, maybe it's not, I don't know. But I did then, as a result of that internal question, come across something that may be familiar to people. You may have heard of Pope Leo the 14th. Ooh, sounds it sounds familiar. Sounds very familiar. Okay, and he's the current, he's the sitting pope. I don't know if that's I don't know if that's the terminology you use, but he's the sitting pope. He's the he's a chap who's born in the US. He what's the word? He didn't supersede. He took over, I guess. Yeah, after Pope Francis. Got the gig, got the gig, yes. Yeah, he got the gig. Anyway, anyway, popes every now and again write what are called encyclicals, and they are big deals, they are pieces of work that are both scholarly and speak to the traditions of the church and the teachings, so they are kind of theological, but they're also scholarly, in some cases, they are also sociological. So there's that he recently, or the Holy See press office, if you like, the uh publication house that's owned by the Vatican, I guess. Yes, yes, they published in late May or early June the latest encyclical, or Pope Leo the 14th's first encyclical that runs to about 82 pages. Okay, and it's called Magnifica Humanitas. It does sound beautiful, yes.
SPEAKER_02Say it again, Paul, say it again.
SPEAKER_00Magnifica humanitas, yes. Well, I'm I mean, I don't know how you exactly you pronounce the Latin, but it's Magnifica Humanitas. That's kind of what it is, and it's mostly deals with AI, although it has a few other things in it. Now, it's 82 pages split into five chapters. I've only really finished reading maybe three and a half chapters, so I haven't actually finished the whole thing, but I'm figuring Magnifica Humanitas. I had a hunch, or maybe I just hypothesized, or maybe I was just stretching for some something hopeful. Yeah. Uh it might give me a new way of reading. So, yeah, basically it means magnificent humanity for those of us who aren't across our Latin. And Magnificent Humanity, the encyclical. There you go. And it's sub or the sub-edit or the subtitle is on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. So I thought, hmm, interesting. Maybe I'll give this a read. I don't have a faith tradition in the Catholic Church. So, in a sense, I don't have a horse in that race, but I thought maybe it's worth looking at, maybe it's worth reading.
SPEAKER_02So, so what how did you find it? I mean, uh obviously it's a a big publication, a widely distributed public publication, but if you don't have any like foot in that door, do you get it as a notification? Do you you know how do you AG how does it show up for you? AG, it's called news. News.
SPEAKER_00The news said, Yeah, oh see, I don't I don't do that. When the Pope publishes anything, yeah, when the Pope says anything, yeah, someone, someone is going to report on it. I gotcha, I gotcha. Okay, and because this was an encyclical, then it already has some import, right? That being people notice, take up notice, and because it was about AI, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure, I'm sure some of our listeners are much more connected to that than you clearly are, KG, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So I heard I heard it on the news maybe a month or two ago. Yeah, it must have stayed in my head somewhere because I thought, oh, that's the thing that they did. I'm gonna go and find it. And it's very easy to find. You know, nevertheless, we'll put the link to the full thing in our show notes, but it's very easy to find. Anyway, I'm having finished reading it yet. However, however, there are a few things that I thought, okay, interesting. What I'm taking away here, okay, the main thing I'm taking away is that this encyclical doesn't it doesn't rail against AI first and foremost, which I thought, oh, that's good. It's not one of those church-driven or faith-driven or religious-driven or theologically driven rants about AI. It does place some very strong, strong language around what some of its constraints should be. Yeah. So, for example, in a sense, it from what I understand, some of these constraints are an extension, if you like, or an addition to some of the things that Pope Francis had already said in the past around AI and so forth. For example, the biggest thing it's is it's a call for disarmament, right? So it's a literal disarmament in that what we're seeing now in warfare in the geopolitical sense is the use of AI to determine not only how certain weapons are deployed, but what happens is that AI is increasingly being used. And I don't know how much, I'm not really across the detail of exactly how these would be used, but my understanding is that there is in this insectical is responding to the fact that AI is now potentially choosing who is the target and who isn't. So you have a situation where basically artificial intelligence is targeting human life and making decisions around where should these weapons be deployed. And so the outright call to ban AI from the arms race, the call to ensure that machine does not or is not involved in taking human life, that's a big call. Yeah, that is a big call. That is, but the other thing that it's doing, which I found interesting and is worth a cheeky half because really I am literally halfway through this, and this is barely a digested thought. But Poplio centers or grounds, if you like, grounds human intelligence, not so much, and this is why it was interesting to me, because the register that we're talking about, that we're talking about earlier, that we keep hearing in this bubble, it feels like it's all about doing more with less or doing different things or expanding our efficiency or expanding our productivity or expanding our creativity, whatever it might be. Yeah, what this encyclical is doing is saying it's not that, it's not efficiency, right? Human intelligence cannot be traded as a transaction, as an efficient co or a coefficient of productivity. Yeah, human intelligence, in fact, is grounded in a much deeper concept, which is the concept of human dignity. Okay. Now, I'm sure there are arguments out there that I haven't I've yet to come across that talk of human dignity, but this encyclical just really places it right in the center, right? So it grounds human dignity as infinite, right? Infinite, and it's neither acquired nor earned nor justified, and it does talk about dignity as not being technological, yeah. And so there is a kind of a material difference in that. Now, of course, being an encyclical that was written by the Pope, there are lots of kind of theological analogies and theological threads and teachings that are woven through the argument. But even if you're not a believer, or even if you don't ascribe to those theological tenets, the very fact of human dignity is an I think an interesting idea and concept to sit with when we're thinking about the differences between us as intelligent beings and the tools that we create as a result, including artificial intelligence. Yeah. And I'm not sure about you, KG. I haven't come across that argument. No, and and I don't know what the practical implication, the practical implications are of holding that position of using the notion of human dignity as an argument not against AI, but as a material difference between us and AI that cannot be bridged, no matter what we think, no matter how good AI becomes. There is something irreducible about human dignity that can't be traded. And I'm interested in that idea. I don't know where it's gonna take me once I keep reading, and I don't know whether it's gonna give us anything different in terms of position, but I thought, wow, this is interesting. He's arguing about dignity and that dignity is irreducible and it's not transferable. So there's this notion of what he calls or what the what the encyclical calls post-human or transhuman, which I'm not quite sure what it means yet, but there's a sense of it's to do with the transference of human qualities or characteristics. So if something is post-human, it looks a certain way, like it might feel human, it might it might almost be as human, and therefore we can transfer dignity to that being. What the encyclical is saying is no, in terms of transhumanism or post-humanism, dignity doesn't work that way. Now I don't know, once again, I haven't sat with the argument long enough. Yeah, I haven't read around it enough because I sense that it's much deeper and complex than I'm currently understanding. But I thought, wow, okay, this is just an argument that doesn't talk about or spend my, you know, waste my time talking about those productivity things or the efficiency things, or it doesn't talk about kind of the cybernetic world opening up to human beings and allowing us to do more. It's not about that, it's really about this is who we are fundamentally. And I'm wondering whether, and once again, it might come up near the end, but I'm wondering whether grounding this idea of human dignity or grounding the argument in the the difference between human intelligence and AI and artificial intelligence is so that the panic that we initially or just recently, just now, talked about, whether that's going to help people process, whether the fact that, hey, hang on, AI does not have this intrinsic worth that I have as a human being. And therefore, flowing out of that, maybe AI does take my job, so to speak, but the fear is a different type of fear. It's something that I can control or something that I can manage because it's not about losing my humanity, it's not about losing my identity. And as perhaps earth shattering as losing your job might be, it's not the same, it's not equivalent to also you losing your humanity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a distinction, which is great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I wonder whether that's the idea of this encyclical and whether that is it's there to help people deal with the fear, because the fear may not just be about losing your job, it might be about losing your humanity. And what the encyclical is suggesting is that well, that's not even possible. But how do we understand or embrace our humanity and our dignity that comes from that humanity, which can never be reduced to some sort of efficiency coefficient or equation, and it can never be taken away from us. So I thought it was interesting. And the other reason that I think it's interesting is because there are lots of other knowledge structures in the world where human dignity is at the center of its worldview, and I find that quite interesting. It's not just the purview of the Catholic Church, for example, or any other, or it's not just the purview of any other type of faith or religion, there are other knowledge structures that aren't theistic that are also very much grounded in human dignity. I mean, I'm thinking perhaps you know of some of indigenous knowledge structures and worldviews where the human is is worthy of dignity and honor and respect just intrinsically for who they are. So there's a transcendence there in terms of the argument, so you can transcend beyond the Catholic teaching and so forth. But yeah, interesting. I find that very interesting, and I don't quite understand what it all means, but it does scratch that initial itch I had of is there anybody out there writing something different about AI? Yeah. And I'm finding this quite different. It is, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_02And just listening to it, I'm like, wow, I never would have even put the the conversations together, right? And I think that's what makes it different and interesting because you you think of dignity as a almost a a pride an emotion that you contain within, right? Each person has it within them, right? And I think, you know, giving us something, some language that helps separate is good. It's just, you know, I I would have never put them together because I think AI, I think an information system, and I think a system that has learned from what we give it. But I think there's also a good separation there because as it evolves, you know, it gets closer and closer to the information or the reactions that we would have and so forth. But you know, that dignity, you can't make that up, or you know, you can't that can't be taken away and it can't be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you can't argue it away, you can't trade it away. Yeah. Uh, even though, of course, we know that over centuries there has been been many occasions, many thousands, hundreds, thousands, I don't know how many, many occasions where dignity has not been afforded to a group or a group of people or a cohort, and as a result, inhuman things have happened.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yes.
SPEAKER_00So the minute you remove the minute you remove or deny dignity, things happen. So maybe that's the other thing. Maybe, maybe the the anchor is understanding human dignity, and maybe that is a way through all the hype and conversation. I don't know, because there's so much hype about AI2 that's involved and the whole notion of sentience. And we call that an information system, but other people are calling it much more than that. So, yeah, so yeah, so anyway, cheeky half. That is my wow, unprocessed thoughts.
SPEAKER_02And and it is uh unprocessed, but wow, it's thought provoking, man. So you you you've left us with some stuff to to to ponder over, which I love. I love.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So you know, as unusual as it is for us to say, shout out to Pope Leo the 14th. Thank you, thank you for magnificent remaining pass.
SPEAKER_02Yes, let's see if if he comes back to us. That's what I want to see.
SPEAKER_00We'll see, yeah. Now I'm just gonna finish reading it and hopefully it'll still be it'll still be interesting and informative. We'll see.
SPEAKER_02We'll see. With that, yeah, yeah. It's it's been great, Paul. Appreciate everything. And you know, if you have any more information on this human dignity and you want to bring it back to the next episode, maybe, maybe let us, you know. Yeah, I'll I'll let you finish. I'll let you finish. Sound like Kanye West, but you know, the the the yeah, Taylor. But once you once once once you finish, let us know.
SPEAKER_00Please do, please do. Um we're really keen to understand what your take is too. I mean, if anyone has read it, or if you want to read it, like I said, we'll put it in the show notes. Let us know what you think. How does this shape or help shape your thinking about AI? Maybe it doesn't do anything at all. I don't know. Uh, but yeah, it'd be interesting to see.
SPEAKER_02Is it wrong of me to think that I, you know, my first thought was, oh yeah, I'll have AI summarize it for me real quick. But uh, that's probably wrong. I should probably step on it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, you can do that too. You can do that too. You can do that too. Uh I would I would strongly urge that you read it. Because you know, but you know, yeah, sure. If if there are things that uh I should have thought of that. Dang. But there's an irony irony in that, isn't it? AI, please help me understand human dignity.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02Uh that was an interesting prompt. See what see what it's uh see what it comes back.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks, KG, for uh indulging me on this one. That was great. And uh on that note, slogger. That is a cheeky half episode. Please let us know what you think. Whether you'd like us to expand on any of these topics in the main episodes, or any other comment you might have. You can reach us on ask us at leadershipcamon.com. That's at leadershipcamon.com. You can also leave your comments for each of our episodes on the website at leadershipcamon.com. Thanks for listening.
