How AI Environments Change Us with Dr. Brett Robinson

If you've ever heard someone say the medium is the message or talk about the global village or even refer to modern time as the electric age These ideas all come from one Catholic man named Marshall McClune now obviously before these interviews I prepared a lot a lot of research and I came across Dr. Brett Robinson's Program at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame and the program is called the Church Communications Ecology Program And when I went to landing page saw these four pictures. It's a simple landing page Pictures of two people I didn't recognize and two people I definitely did and they were surprising Mr. Rogers and Andy Warhol and then this guy by the name of Marshall McClune and this woman Rachel Carson This set me down a path that led to me becoming Really obsessed for a while with this man Marshall McClune He's a Canadian philosopher. He died in 1980. He's a Catholic convert who converted after reading A bunch of Chesterton and he becomes one of the most influential media theorists during his time while he was alive but I think what's most significant about him is how relevant his writing is today and the theme of this conversation with Dr. Robinson as well as the figures of Marshall McClune and Mr. Rogers Andy Warhol What this all begins to represent for me especially as I look back is is this third option this third courageous faithful hopeful posture towards technology and because of this amalgamation of of constraints and engagement of hope but also of concern They were able to have such a massive impact on media and culture McClune wasn't very public about his Catholic faith, but it influenced his thinking and he's become such a relevant touchstone for for myself and others during this age of AI You're going to listen to this I think and you're going to wish that you could audit or take this class on Church communications ecology and so this was the closest I could get to taking this class and it was such a such a joy and so um thought provoking and encouraging so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did here is Dr. Brett Robinson All right, so I'm trying to remember when was this 2009? I think I was teaching at St. Vincent College I was teaching a course on technology and the faith and the alumni magazine interviewed me and at the very end They're like what what's coming what are you thinking about this is 2009? I was like well artificial intelligence is coming and you know We have to you know contend with the fact that we're creating the machines that Might know us better than we know ourselves I was like that's good like did I say that 15 years ago? I was like all right, so I haven't Still got like an intuition maybe what do you think what we what did you have a pulse on that? Or would you have a finger on the pulse of that you think at the time 2009? What was going on? So smartphone would just come out in 2007 yeah iPhone um social media was Around but it wasn't quite what it is now. I was thinking about the way in which smartphones Social media we're already starting to capture so much of our experience We were like willing participants in this social experiment to share our entire lives and identities and experiences with the world And of course, I'm thinking you know, this is going into some database somewhere and AI was like very much in the distant horizon, but it was like well um What do we you know what do we do with all that information? Right, and then of course AI Was designed to figure out how to yeah synthesize massive amounts of information. This was like Marshall McClure new I studied this was his point was you know that in the electric age he called it Although it could apply the digital age too that That pattern recognition becomes the mode by which we have to kind of understand the world versus like uh In the print age, you know, you could read something It it followed sort of a logical sequence, you know, it worked kind of the way Or a trainer brains to work in a certain way to think logically sequentially This sort of thing, but when you increase the rate of information That we're consuming and exposed to you can't do that anymore. Yeah, that way to follow In a sort of linear logical way, so you just get these bursts of information that you have to then make sense of yeah And so you look for patterns because there's too much and that's what we train machines to do is look for patterns That's how AI works. Yeah, so it reminds me of have you seen the movie everything everywhere a lot once Oh, yeah, no, but I know it's kind that that's kind of the sense I got it's almost like post post modern is it's like Or boburnums documentary. Yeah, it like side. Yeah, it's like there's so much and how you navigate All of that option and all of that information Yeah, it becomes like the hardest part of it because we can't trust an algorithm to show us anything because even that feed is just There's so much information, right, and so on and then that becomes metaphor for How we sort of think about reality and this is you know that You know, why is it that now everyone's talking about multiverses right like is it the big sort of Trinity scientific thing? Is it because we've made new discoveries? Is it suggests that's a possibility? I think we have in physics and whatever I don't know that world well enough, but you also have to look at the technologies we're using in the way in which they pattern the way we think and so The fact that we had this infinite array of paths we can follow through something like the internet Suggested. Well, maybe there's like alternate reality. Yeah, like so it just they bleed into each other and so We we start to think of the world in these metaphorical. We don't do it consciously We're not like oh well the world is like the internet or something, but But sometimes we do like we have movies like the matrix or something where you have that idea and make it explicit um, and so I just find that fascinating. I look at it historically. So I look at Going back to oral communication scribble, you know that these are patterns of communication That pattern our way of thinking and pattern the way we relate to one another so yeah I've heard that you know at the dawn of the invention of or the rise of machines The way we were thinking about the brain was more like a machine like a physical machine But then with computers were are the way we even speak about the brain is much more, you know memory There's all these things where we're more I need to hear us. Oh, yeah, I know that the bandwidth for that. Yeah It's all the metaphors in everyday speech um, and it's you know, it's cognitive science which is not that old I mean, it's 100 years old in terms of the discipline. Maybe not even that old Um, but the guys who met at are we actually doing this now? Okay. Yeah Um, the guys who met at Dartmouth in 1956 were who They this was sort of the where people think AI was kind of born um, they were mostly they were computer scientists mathematicians physicist, but but proto cognitive scientists So they really believed that like you said the brain is like a information processing machine and therefore We could make information processing machines that work like brains and so that's like kind of a faulty premise Which leads to some bad conclusions potentially But there's a really interesting footnote to that that Dartmouth workshop in 1956 where they Basically had this mission to figure out how to use you know really sophisticated mathematical probability to to basically create an intelligence or create consciousness um Was there was a physicist and philosopher named Donald McCrimman McCay from the UK Who was invited but didn't come and the reason he didn't come was because he was a devoted Christian He had a lot of kind of moral theological views about science and technology and He saw that premise as faulty and said that's not what intelligence is intelligence also includes things like will and moral reasoning and subjectivity and a machine could never do that And so he didn't come and so So that like you think about origin stories and like how things sort of spawn and go in different directions Had he been there, you know the the AI path may have you know gone in a different direction, but But we still don't know where it's going. We're still in the sort of early phases of figuring out what's happening But I think as Catholics that We've lost in a way or we need to retrieve I should say Understandings of the human mind human consciousness that the church has already taught and believed for centuries Most notably Aquinas's idea that we have souls I mean church believes that but the but his notion that um he calls it faculty psychology that the soul has these parts The the memory the imagination the cogitative sense um and that's how that's how consciousness sort of operates at that kind of soul level Um, and so that can't be mechanized right like they think that those are things that can't fully be turned into machines But if you change the metaphor and you say well the brain's just a machine then you could create machines Yeah, I make you wonder if if AI now is this newer model or how we start talking about neuroscience differently or how people are tempted to start talking about neuroscience and in In reference to and a large language model or or how that pleads over. I've also heard uh two ends of the spectrum described as either do or boom, like there's either a pock elliptic, this is gonna, like let's pull the plug, or boom, like this is the best thing ever. I wonder where would you place yourself, do you think, on that spectrum? - Yeah, I think I probably started my journey in the Doom camp, and I've moved slowly into maybe Aristotle's golden mean of somewhere in between. I'll never probably, maybe I'm being premature and saying this, I don't think that I'll ever be just a total apologist for AI, and believe it's this sort of saving force. I think what makes me nervous, and where I started my research 20 years ago, was I did a book on Apple, and I looked at the Apple brand cult at that time, and you know, in the early personal computer movement, you had people that weren't just like interested in computers, but they were felt like they were part of a movement, a community that had these quasi-religious kind of undertones, including in the book, I talk about the logos, sort of the fruit-been fruit, and the obgenesis, and how Steve Jobs is kind of cult figure, cult leader. And so I traced through Apple this history of conflating religion, religious belief, religious aspirations, spiritual aspiration, to technology, and I think we're seeing that replay in Silicon Valley with transhumanist movements, and this new thing, not new, but this idea, this group called the rationalist, which is this kind of quasi-religious group that has these texts that they all read together about, you know, about, you know, reason, and how, basically how this is going to shape the AI future in ways that are good for humanity, but it has a very religious flavor to it. And that makes me nervous. So that's right. That's where the apocalyptic part kind of feels more right. And what I tell my students is I taught a course called surviving the digital apocalypse. And I say that apocalypse doesn't mean destruction, right? That's more like Armageddon. Apocalypse is Greek for revelation, or something is being revealed. So I think every time we encounter a new technology, or develop a new technology, and then think about what that means, that something's being revealed about ourselves. So now we're having this conversation about what does it mean to be human? What is intelligence? What is the soul? Can a machine have a soul, right? So in that way, I'm hopeful, because I feel like as long as we're having the conversation, there's still hope. So that's where I would put my hand. Yeah, that's fair. The part of the reason we're having this conversation is it's so fascinating to hear how someone with a philosophy of the human person background, they have certain advantages from their education and training and things that they're aware of and thinking of to approach AI with that background. And with your background in philosophy of technology, which I know very little about, but I'm wondering what advantages or what do you bring from that background to your approach to AI that maybe someone else who doesn't study if I'm saying that correctly, philosophy of technology. Like what are some of the ways you're looking at this differently than someone else like you has no background in that? Yeah, I mean, so I studied mass communication. That was my PhD, although my diploma from the University of Georgia just says Dr. Philosophy. So I can say, "Flots for English." Yeah, but I got very interested, even before that, in the philosophy of technology, which I mean, you could go all the way back to Aristotle and his discussions of Techné and understanding like how and why we make things and what knowledge is created out of that. But when I encountered Marshall McCluen, I think many people would probably call philosophy of media or technology, I saw someone who was able to integrate the Catholic intellectual tradition. So he was reading Chesterton, he was reading Aquinas. But he was never an evangelist or an apologist. He was working in 1960s, 1970s, academia and Canada, where it wasn't fashionable to be a Catholic intellectual. So he hid all of that. And so all of his work is a cryptocatholic. And so half of my fascination with him is that is decoding that and finding the Catholic kind of intellectual tradition buried within all these nuggets of wisdom that I think he left behind most notably being the medium is the message. And he's the guy that coined that because I've heard that phrase before and then doing the research and going deep into that, I was like, that's the guy's Catholic. Like I've heard people say that before. That's the guy. And he understood the age he was working. And he was the 60s and 70s. It was television. It was the sound by it was, so as an academic, who studied by the way like Shakespearean poetry and sorry, Shakespearean Elizabethan poetry, grammar, logic and rhetoric. That was the subject of his dissertation and the classical trivia. He was a literary scholar, but he saw in his study of language and literature that the form that something takes actually has more of an impact on the reader than the content itself. So he used poetry as a good example of that. That you can't trace the meaning of a poem to the meaning of the individual words or phrases in the poem. There's something about the poetic form that has this sort of transformative power over the reader. And he goes back to Homer and looks at the epics and how they do that. But then he had this moment, I guess, where he thought, well, this also could apply to media technologies because they are forms of communication that have their own grammar, have their own logic and have their own rhetoric, right? So there are new language in a sense that we have to learn as human beings to be able to use them well. So the phrase the medium is a message was, yeah, the form actually matters more than the message in terms of the effect it has on the reader, the listener, the viewer. But the Catholic insight that is in there, which he admitted later in a letter or maybe an essay that wasn't published was that Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of the medium is a message. So the incarnation of Christ, God taking human form, that form matters the most, right? Like Jesus had a message and he preached and he did these things. But God taking human form was the definitive turn in salvation history. We had commandments, we had prophets, we had all sorts of things. We could listen to a read prior to Christ that would lead us to God, but it wasn't until he took the form that had changed everything. So apply that to media and you can see how these things kind of play out. Yeah. Man, so applying that to AI, if I'm thinking, okay, the medium is the message, how would you describe that form in the AI context? Is it as simple as like, oh, this is text or is it deeper than that? Because there's other things behind the scenes that are going on. It's the behind the scene stuff that you have to suss out and it's harder, especially when you're living through it. So he like to say that we tend to look at things through the rear view mirror. So we're really good at looking behind us and being like, oh, that's what's going on and you've already passed that. Like you need to look out the front, which is far more mysterious and chaotic to understand. And so it's easier to look back and say like, let's say television as a form, is a form that appeals or extends, I should say, he said every technology extends some human ability or faculty. So television extends the imagination. So if something we would do in our own heads, when we dream, whatever fantasize, we're now doing in a technological form. So we're sort of dreaming outside of ourselves or projecting these fantasies onto a screen. And so what do you get? You get sort of a fantasy culture. You get Walt Disney World. You get just do it. You do, you know, dream it. You can be it. You know, it's all about like, - actually, - like, actually, - the factual is actually through these sort of aspirational fantasies. Computers are different. So as a form, it's a memory machine. Computers store information. They don't necessarily do project fantasy insofar as we've imported, you know, television content into the new medium. But McCleoon would say the new, the new medium always sort of imports or brings the old forms and turns them into content. So the form of television, the form of radio, the form of the newspaper has now become the content of the internet. But the internet itself is a different animal. So it's tempting to say it's having, you know, you'll hear this a lot like, well, we have the attention span of a goldfish, right? Because we have all this quick short form content and it's messing with our minds. But the research on that goes back to the 70s on television. Like that's when we started losing the attention spans. Something the attention deficit, the attention span, this order's started, you know, well before the internet. But we're now looking through the rear view mirror going, oh, that's what happened, right? So I think with AI as a form, the computer as a form, you're looking at an opportunity, I think, for the church to say, people are now remembering things more. Because in one way, they're forgetting more because they're outsourcing their memory to the machine. But because the machine is just, you know, shot full with memory, cultural memory, personal memory, retrieving that memory, encountering that memory becomes more of a thing. So I often say to people, why are young people so interested in the traditional mass? Like that's, they can't be nostalgic for it. I don't even allow when it was being offered. It's because they're encountering the memory of it through these mediums, which they never could have before. And they're saying, "What's that? That looks cool. That's mysterious. I want to try that." So the church being a chain of religion, it's helping a chain of memory, actually, I think that's one of the brighter spots in a digital age. It's like, okay, maybe we can recover some of that memory and have something like a new renaissance, which, you know, etymologically means to, you know, to be reborn, to take the old and give it new life. So, yeah, a Catholic renaissance in the age of AI, I'm not opposed to that. (laughing) - Where does the word ecology fit into all of this? We have medium is a message, but then I was surprised to see ecology. I associate that with biology, or organic systems and things. And this came up in a previous interview, it was interesting as well to see the pattern where anthropic how to video online where they're talking about interpretability, like how do we know what is going on behind the scenes with these large language models? And they had someone on staff that was a biologist, which they were like, that's kind of odd. And they said, well, these systems are kind of operating more like biological systems. So then when I saw ecology and I was like, "Man, there's a pattern here. "What's going on? "Why ecology and communication?" - Wow, I didn't know that. That's fascinating. - Yeah, so one of the other terms that, I don't think McClure and Coindit, but a colleague of his Neil Postman, called it media ecology. And the idea was that media are not just tools, isolated tools that we kind of use for good or ill, but they actually create new environments. So when I introduce the smartphone to the culture, I'm not just introducing a thing you put in your pocket and get your email on. I'm introducing a whole ecosystem of changes into the culture. So I need cell towers, I need batteries, I need rare earth minerals to build the phones. I need, you know, so the culture, the literally ecology, the natural ecology takes a hit, right? And we know this with AI with the power, you know, supply demands on AI data centers and they're just eating up a lot of energy. So there's a way to think about technology ecologically in that sense of the physical environment, but also metaphorically as itself an environment that gets created that becomes kind of a surround for us. So, you know, people used to say, well, if you have all these things to say about television, you know, Professor McCleod, why not just not have a television? And he would say it doesn't matter. If you live in a television culture and it doesn't matter if you don't have or have a television 'cause now you're in this television surround. As I am, you're escaping the effects of television on the culture, you just have to live within it. And the same goes for, you know, I'm gonna give it my smartphone. Well, great. Now, like, but you're surrounded by them and there's no way to really, truly extract yourself from the environment of this smartphone. - Yeah, and it's kind of like if you, if even if you were to isolate yourself completely from the outside world as much as possible, if you need to communicate with the outside world, you have to communicate in a way that is intelligible to them. And they are living in a world of phones and this whole ecology, what you're saying is like that informs even in an unconscious way, the way they're thinking about it. - Yeah. It's like an ecosystem, like you said. I mean, if you go into an ecosystem, let's say a pond or something and you introduce a new species, all of a sudden the balance or the equilibrium that ecosystem can get thrown out of whack, right? So it's some predatory species that ends up eating all the fish and now there's no, you know, and then the thing collapses in some way, right? So ecosystems naturally, biologically, seek equilibrium. And when we have these human interventions, you can see this at the environmental level, the industrial revolution did this, we're seeing this again with information, revolutions, but it's impacting the ecosystem, and I would say psychological ecosystem of the culture. So like in your example, like if we don't, if I don't have the smartphone, I can't communicate with anyone, but also because let's say I'm only going to interact with human beings, I'm not gonna use my phone, while those human beings are using phones. And so their patterns of thought, their patterns of behavior, their habits are already kind of smartphoneified. And so you're learning from that. So you're just picking up the same, so it's this kind of, you can't escape that ecosystem. - Man, I'm fascinated by that. So I might be stepping in something here, but so I was at a Catholic Churchestern Academy and I brought this up in the past, the president was showing, we're very proud that there's no technology in here, there's the lockers don't even have doors. And I had said, well, how is this AI reality kind of impacting the way you're thinking about? And he said, oh, not at all. And there was something in my intuition that said something about that's not right. And what I think I'm hearing is like, yeah, even if you isolate yourself from it, you still have to not understand actually how to use the tech. And I think that's where people hear is like, and then I say, well, how is that impacting it? What they hear is, oh, kids should know how to use this stuff. And it's like, no, it has an effect on how we communicate with the outside world. So am I off there? Am I intuition off? I mean, I have a story about that that is very similar. My wife is director of admissions for a classical Christian school. And she said, we really need a technology policy because same thing, like the sort of default policy is no phones, all right. So, but I don't think that goes far enough to your point. Because you're not addressing kind of the root issue, which is, well, the kid's living in a culture of this. And so the answer is not, as you said, just teaching him how to use it well. But they have to develop habits of mind, a perception that in a way or like anecdotes to it, you're also being aware of it in an explicit way. And even maybe finding creative ways to integrate it that don't undermine the mission of that approach, that pedagogy. Exactly. So it's so funny because she's like, okay, so I took all the things you always talk about, like Macluan and Gordini. And I gave a prompt, the chat GBT. And it kicked out this really brilliant technology policy for the Christian Academy. And I'm like, there's something very ironic and wrong about that. But I would love to hear what you think about. The example that came to mind is I had a friend who we were talking about using AI. And I was showing him some different things I was doing. And he said, man, it seems like your experience directing others or other team members really helped you navigate directing AI. And he was like, I don't have very much experience directing someone in what to do. I just say, go do this thing. But you're like giving all this other context and methodology and all these things. And that was something I had just a quick example of like, well, the way you structure your program could incorporate giving other students instructions or things that just, that's maybe a dumb example. But I don't know, is that, I guess I'm looking for approval here. Well, no, I think I think there's either, like, yeah, you're using it as a crutch that's so debilitating that you're never going to learn to walk. Or you already know how to walk. And this is going to help you walk more farther or something. And I think that there is a literacy involved in, I think there's a, someone needs to write a book on this. But you know, plenty of people have written books on child development and intellectual development, psychological, social, emotional development. I think someone needs to do this media overlay and say like, at what stage in development are, is this tool appropriate? Is this tool appropriate? And a friend of mine and I always talk about, he coined the term nested epistemologies, meaning like epistemology being like a way in which we come to know the world. How do we come to know the world? Well, before all of this, of course, it was a very direct experience of the world. It was, you know, even before print, right? It was like, orality. We spoke to one another, we encountered nature directly. We, so we had, we understood the rhythms of other people of nature. I mean, read La Dato Si. It's all about this relationality. And back to your other question about ecology. It's also about integral ecology. So the Pope wasn't just talking about the environment. He was talking about what he called the technocratic paradigm, being an environment or a logic by which that undermines this integral ecology that everything is connected, right? And so we naturally, in our, I don't know, say our natural state, that's philosophically problematic. But like, when we encounter the world that way, as we do as infants, when it's just mimicking our parents' voice or learning from imitation, there's something very direct about that learning. When I introduce a toddler to an iPad, I skip millennia of, to me, vacation skills. So if you already know how to lead people, and you're using this as a supplement to that, that's different than saying, I don't know how to lead people. Let me ask the AI how you do that. So how do we build the competencies and the literacies early on? And I think the classical model is a really good way to do that. So that when they encounter the tool, that they can use it in these ways that are supplemental and not substitutional. Yeah, that makes sense. Man, that's fast. So, okay, so if we start thinking like, I'm a Catholic navigating this world, and then I'm hearing what you're saying, and I'm thinking, man, the AI environment or ecosystem's going to impact the way, whether I like or not, I could not use it at all. But I do, I have a responsibility to communicate my neighbors like to participate in society, and I might be thinking, okay, how does that ecology shape someone's mind? Like, what would be some of the bullet points I'd put for like how interacting with AI on a daily basis changes the way they think about the world or they communicate? What things come to mind for you? One thing that comes in mind that I'm still working this idea out, but this this kind of imperative to predict. Like, if I'm looking at the formal elements of AI and not the flashy like creative language models spitting out a poem or something and maybe I'm like, oh no, I can't be a poet. But rather like the sort of mechanics of how that actually, you know, the behind the scenes as you said earlier of like what's happening? So you have this large language model that is using statistical probability to figure out the next word in a sequence, the next phrase in a sequence. And so that that rootonizes I think even subconsciously us to think about language or relation as something predictive, something I have to predict the next thing. So I think we as we were talking about earlier as we use the language of the machine in everyday life. We also adopt some of its like habits or faculties as you know, as Father John Calkin said, we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. So it begins to shape us to do it the way it does it. And so we'll never be, you know, statistical probability machines, but we might out of a sense of imitation or inferiority be like, well, maybe if I can predict, you know, X that means me more valuable value or so. And this is what all the big corporations are doing. I mean, they're trying to predict buyer behavior. But they're going like way back in the sequence, whereas before like I used to work in consumer package, good marketing and you would, we'd set up fake shelves and bring in subjects and they would like look and we'd be like, where are they looking? Right. Which yeah, we should we put the toothpaste on. We just predict where they're going to they're going back like 10 steps. They're like, if you wake up at 6 a.m. and go to the gym and then you go to mass and then you check your Twitter feed and then you feed the dog, it's more likely that you will buy a cup of coffee around 10 a.m. Whatever, like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But taking these like statistical data points and like creating this huge matrix, decision matrix that is super personalized, hyper personalized, so that you now can predict individual behavior. And this is what Palantir and all these other companies on the defense and intelligence side are trying to do is like predict crimes, predict, you know, yeah, attacks or whatever and using that kind of wild matrix to predict it. And so, so you know, as humans, what does that mean for us? Are we going to do we need to start becoming like oracles or like, yeah, help our prophetic powers. Yeah. Something to keep up with the machine. Well, to me, it just highlights and this is a theme that's coming up again and again, and it seems very obvious. But for people listening, like understanding the philosophy of the human, understanding what the church teaches about who the human person is, what what that experiences are faculties, all those things is so important. It brings the mind there was a famous economist. There was some interaction I'd heard where an economist was at a dinner and some student or someone said, hey, professor, you know, it's interesting that in all of your economic models, people are rational and logical. But in all of your interactions with people in real life, they're dumb, illogical and emotional. Like, why is that? But in the models, it makes me think of the statistical, you know, when you're trying to predict based on probability how someone acts, it is useful to a certain degree. But at the end of the day, like, I'm not a statistic, like that's not who I am. Right. You have to treat me differently. Right. That's actually probably a better prediction if we were to take on the predictive is if that's the mode or the form by which the machine operates and that's having effect on us, I think what you're describing is the natural human reaction. It's not, I think I'm wrong. I don't think it's we try to become more predictive. I think we try to become more unpredictable. Oh, yes. Yeah. Because think about like how we think about the faith and as you said, the human person, it's like the way that grace works is that there's some contingency, there's some vulnerability in our life that we can't fill. There's a risk. There's an unknown and then God operates. He works. He like does something that we witnessed too and like that was grace, like that's a gift and you give thanks for that. But the more you, you know, if you create the sort of technocratic society in which you try to block out all contingency risk vulnerability by creating the sort of safest, most predictable, you know, outcomes or whatever. On the one hand, that sounds like kind of attractive. But also you and I think deeply intuitively, we know that's not possible. Nor is it even maybe that desirable because we, there's something in us that wants to be surprised that wants to like encounter that moment that got where God surprises us with something. So I could see art, you know, human behavior becoming more unpredictable in an effort to, you know, resist. Yeah. The predictive. I've been thinking about talking with Catholics about how to navigate this AI age. One way of describing things that I think is helpful is that on the dawn of the internet, it was very much focused on information. Now, like we said, there's so much information. So it's what are you going to do with it and how you repackage it? What, what it seems like is there's now much more of a focus on or there will be a focus on methodologies, frameworks and process. So a big difference between people that just started, you know, the past month with AI and how I've been, you know, evolving how I'm using it is that people start out by just saying, write me an essay and then they might progress to like write me an essay with some of these facts. But then what I've been seeing, even just out in the secular world, people using AI, where it gets much more effective in some ways, there's a lot more emphasis on your process, your method. It's like here, I'm going to upload some different documents to give you, for instance, in Catechesis, there is orthodox, Catechical principles. But then there is like at Francis' University, I was trained in the ecclesial method. So my approach to Catechesis is informed by this method and it seems like now those methods become way more valuable. So if you're a Catholic, it's not just how do you explain the human person, it's explained the human person using this communication method or this, I mean, a more secular, popular example is like, use Donald Miller's story brand to explain the human person. And I wonder if you see some, I don't know what comes of mind when you go, I've seen this in practice. So I developed this program in Notre Dame, called the Church Communications Ecology Program. And we gathered a cohort of not just Catholic communicators, but also teachers and other Catholic professionals and ministers to think about these questions that we're talking about. And one of them, actually several of them were Catholic school teachers, and one taught at a high school, she was an English teacher. And she, her kind of final project was, and I had some Dominican sisters there as well who were developing this in Nashville, which is yeah, a revised pedagogy that, that, it's response to this. And that was precisely what they landed on was the importance of process. So if you have a tool that can create the product, if I can say, I need a 10 page paper on X, well, then just asking for a 10 page paper on X is kind of useless, because you know, it can be reproduced by the machine. So the teacher now has to be more intentional and deliberate about focusing on the pieces and parts and elements of the writing process. And they do that usually anyway, but now with more consciousness of what AI is doing to really hone in on what are, you know, so the drafting actually becomes more important. And those drafts are really where all the action is, it's not, oh, my paper's doing two weeks, I'll turn it in, they teach you all great it, it's going to be this, this process. And same with exams now, teachers responding by saying, we're just going to do oral exams, we're going to do in class written exams. Which is funny because I have a friend who says he speaks very nomically like McClellan and he says, digital retrieves the medieval. It's retrieving a medieval sensibility. And I took me years to like try to, and I still don't quite understand that, but, but I can see in this respect, like the medieval classroom was one of oral discourse dialogue, disputation, and conversation. And there's a famous book, not that famous, I guess, for non nerds, but like this guy Walter Ong, who was also worked with McClellan, wrote about Peter Raimus, who was an educational reformer in the 1516 century, who basically is the grandfather PowerPoint. So he figured out that, wait, why are we doing all this talking? We can like create visual schemas of knowledge. We can create tables, we can create images, and create. And so the classroom moves from this very alive dynamic, active discourse and disputation to, here's the facts, like read the chart, we're going to capture it here. So In that, you can see the kind of the proto genes of AI, right, that you're able to schematize and synthesize knowledge and create a sort of synthetic version that's very easily portable. So breaking that process back down into how did we even get there and how did we get to that knowledge, right? So I think that's why the work you're doing and the sort of the pedagogy itself has to change. And the Catholic schools, the Catholic church is so well equipped to respond to this as long as they don't just drink the Kool-Aid on AI. And the problem with that is, and you see this in a lot of these Catholic education conferences, the billions and billions of dollars invested in edtech and the vendors that come to those conferences and say, you know, this is your answer and they put a little Catholic patina on it and say, you know, it'll be great and it's not. So teachers have to be discerning and not be afraid to, you know, to try these other methods, as you said, the methods and the processes. Yeah. What, when I was doing the research on the ecology program, there's three names on the site. And so McCluein was made a little more sense on how to relate that to AI. Yeah. But Mr. Rogers, like Mr. Rogers, and you had it under a heading that said, Pastor, yeah. And so I'm wondering like, what is Mr. Rogers has to teach us about AI? Like, what as a Catholic Catholic AI in Mr. Rogers, so not three words I would think would be in a conversation, but here we are. Here we are. And Rachel Carson was the other one. She was the environmental activist, and we've already talked about ecology. So that's why she was on the list was trying to think about media ecologically. So let's study one of the first modern ecologist or environmentalists. She was responding, of course, to the industrial revolution and the effects it was having. But her, you know, her book Silent Spring, which is kind of the effects of that on nature. I thought it was a really good allegory. I mean, it's factual, but for thinking about media and its effects on human nature and nature itself. Mr. Rogers, though, so part of this is sort of the hometown bias. So I grew up in Pittsburgh and Mr. Rogers was from Pittsburgh and his program was filmed there and was a very popular program in the 70s and 80s for preschool age children. He was a Presbyterian pastor. So he went to the theological seminary. He was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian church. And he, his ministry, as he says, there's a Fred Rogers archive at St. Vincent College where he's to teach the arch-abit at St. Vincent. It was very good friends with the former arch-abit. It was very good friends with Fred Rogers actually ghost wrote some of the episodes. They worked with child psychologists to do what I was talking about earlier, which is figure out what's appropriate for this developmental stage. And when you're using television, you're dealing with like, I mean, a neutron bomb for the brain, right? So how do you hand this off to a three-year-old without doing damage? And Mr. Rogers saw this if Fred Rogers, you know, and he testified before Congress to this effect in the 70s when the PBS was looking for more funding. But he said, you know, I see these programs where, you know, people are, you know, smashing each other into the face with pies and doing all this kind of slapstick violent humor and it's marketed to kids and they're starting to sell them all these other things. And I just don't think that's what I think that's, you know, detrimental to children. And children have this like rich interior emotional life that's developing. And you have to, you have to tread delicately. So he would say the space between the television and the child is holy ground. I mean, you think he really believed that. And what I thought was cool about him and why I brought him in was he found a way to subvert a medium that was so based on the logic of commercialism, sensationalism, fantasy, escape, and turn it into this very personal emotional grounding experience. He always looked right at the child. As if you were the only one in the room. He used music, used puppets. Everything was slow. There was not rapid cutting like in cartoons. It was just one sustained shot. There was the tone of his voice. There was, you know, speaking to them in this compassionate, gentle way. And he never intended it to be a substitute for a parent, right? It wasn't like, because that's another temptation with television is like an electronic babysitter. But, you know, for 20, 30 minutes a day for the child to have this experience watching these puppets and listening to this man talk about these, they talk about their feelings. That was another thing he was very explicit about. So I thought it's looks simple. It looks kind of, it looks childish. I mean, it's for children. But there's some, there's some kind of master class going on here about how you subvert a medium that's that can be so detrimental on day and night. So I wanted the people in the program to think for themselves like, how would you subvert the internet or social media or these places? It can be such cesspools and, yeah, redeem them for the kingdom. I do something like a Presbyterian pastor or do. I'm not sure why, but I'm finding myself emotional about that as you're talking about it. And I think there's an intuition, I think I have that you're touching on about a restraint and not a doom mentality towards TV. And not a, it's a, you know, it's the best thing in the world. But Mr. Rodgers in the ecosystem that he found himself in, took principles that he had about the human person. And like so believed in those principles and was able to within that, within that context, like do something really meaningful. And for some reason, like that, that just really, I don't know, it's making me emotional like thinking about because I think, I think that is how I'm kind of feeling about AI is we could go doom or boom. And I don't know how yet to articulate it. But there's something as a Catholic to say, no, like hold on to those deep principles in the context that you find yourself today. And there is something really meaningful you could do. I don't know if that is like the official stance of, oh, I don't know, it should be. I mean, if those principles are animating you, I mean, you could still make mistakes. But I think there's something yeah, genuinely noble about trying to hold the principles. I mean, the hard part is it's not going to be easy, right? You're going to be pushing against the logic of the machine, the logic of the market, the logic of everything that's kind of controlled, the controlling forces that are animating that machine, that technology. And you're trying to march in with this kind of counter cultural view that is much more, you know, this is what the the antiquity of the Vatican document, with the Pope's been preaching. And you've been saying too, which is like the centrality of the human person, the dignity of the human person, which I think Fred Rogers did such a good job. And you know, what he did was he said, I want to create a program that gets kids off of television, like which is a very like Chester Tony and move like, yeah, it's like meh all the way and like the paradox of you're watching it, but the idea is not watch it. And how does he do that? Well, he he goes out into the neighborhood and he just meets his neighbors and he's like, hey, what do you do? And you know, he has the factory and which I thought was brilliant. Of course in grad school, you get all this like Marxist theory and stuff. And it's like, so I'm watching him in this factory and this woman's make like putting tennis shoes together. And for a kid that's fascinating, first of all, but second of all, it also puts a face on on consumer goods, right? Like they don't just magically appear from Nike or in this sort of fantastical ad and you go to the store and you have the high fashion 120 dollar shoe. There's a human being that like their labor, their sacrifice, their sweat was put into that thing. And he's going to go talk to them. He doesn't care about the shoe, ultimately. He cares about the human person behind the shoe. And so those implicit messages and lessons that he was able to create. So what does TV do? It's a mimetic medium. So we often do what we see, right? Monkey sea, monkey do this. We go by the product we see or we act like the actor on TV that we admire. So if I'm a kid watching that, especially when I'm not impressionable and my response is I want to go talk to my neighbors or I want to learn, you know, I want to be gentle or whatever like the lessons where it's like, okay, good, good on you. Yeah. So way to use it. So how about extra place to AI is a big question and probably very specific to everyone circumstance. So if you're working in a academy and someone else is doing something for the church that's in a different realm, then they have to figure out what those little subversions are that work. But yeah, and it's not as simple as just saying, well, we're just going to put, cap a content in the AI. Right. What comes to mind is for better or for worse, you know, they are what we have to look at as data. But when I look at the websites or the messaging or even the experience of Groc and Meta's, a llama versus anthropic and open AI, you see really quickly on the one side, futuristic start trek looking stuff, you see images of machinery and science and, you know, visualize data graphs and all that. And then you go on anthropic and open AI. And it's physical, you know, it's grass and water and it's a guy making a pot. And it's like not clear where AI is involved on this guy crafting little trinkets and stuff. and stuff. And so for not to say that they're the perfect company, but just that to me stands out as an example of how you might show something that then invites someone to try to do AI this way. And I'm thinking like, man, how would a Catholic, like because when Mr. Rogers is going to meet all of his neighbors, it kind of unconsciously is like, oh, I could go meet my neighbor. Like I could go, like there are people in the world that are friendly that I can explore and explore the world. And I don't know, that's what comes to mind is like how might a Catholic do that, even better than an anthropic or open AI? - Yeah, yeah, I think one of the issues is that we've assumed that the chatbot has become the dominant mode by which we engage with AI. I think a Catholic should ask, like are there other ways? Are there other environments? Are there other interfaces? Interface is a big one. I think interface is a fascinating field of study. And in fact, Colliega Mine is just recommended to book to me on interface culture, but like interface being, and McCleoon was being on this too, interfaces are those places of interplay between, you know, if it's me and my phone, it's the phone interface, right? That's somewhere in that process I'm translating. My desire, my attention into this phone. So the chatbot interface, there's something seductive about it 'cause I'm like, feels like I'm talking to somebody or someone. But there's so many other applications, and this is happening in like medical telenetry where if you're in a hospital setting, there's all this data about a patient, and AI can synthesize that and help the ER doc or the physician figure out, you know, a diagnosis or a treatment. None of that's coming through a chatbot. That's like, that's just putting it. So I have a couple of friends on DC who, their artists, see used to work at Uber, and they've taken over this plot of land, it's like an abandoned lot in DC and created this community garden, and because they used to work at Uber and he's very into like sort of digital things, he's really interested in how digital elements can be embedded in environments without taking over. So they're like, they're in the background, they add something to it, but the real action is the people there, the communal. So he actually came to campus a couple weeks ago at Notre Dame here, and they developed basically a GPT for the statues around campus, all the saints. And so you can talk to these saints as you walk around campus, but you don't do it through an interface of the phone or the screen chat, you call a number. So it's like a, it's a callback to a previous technology. It's like an 800 number, it's GPT driven, and you have a conversation with, and they don't say it's the saint talking, that would be kind of sacrilegious, but they have kind of a third person. But you learn about this place, not just this saint, like I could call this number from Seattle and learn about the saint, but like in this place, what does this person's visage mean? And the saint will even say, the figure will say, like that plant over there is a holly bush, and you're standing on this historic ground, and I'm so and so, or you know, the person you're looking at is so and so, and they've done this. And so you kind of reanimate that environment without making technology like, - Yeah. - Is the environment is still the thing. That just is a supplement. So, and that's been done in museums for a while audio tours and different things, but I think those creative uses of embedded tech that aren't, first of all, surveying us and weird unethical ways, but also ways in which to re-enstill or activate wonder in people. So this is obviously a big thing in education is how do we help children maintain that sense of awe and wondering curiosity. And so if it could do that, then you're on to something. If you shut it down, because it's like, well, the machine does everything, what do I care? I don't need to wonder about anything. I just have to type it in. - Yeah. - Then you've lost, you know, you've lost that. - Yeah. So what if you have a short amount of time with, either Catholic leaders or just Catholic, you know, Catholic lady who are starting to become more aware of this topic and navigating it, and even maybe harnessing it themselves? Like what is your, I know this is a hard question, but like just, what is the message that you want most to tell people like that? Like is it an encouraging message, is it a warning message? Is it like, what are the things that you really feel like, like we need to hear, you know? - Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes back to one's own interior formation and practice. So like you have to, for better or, I mean, not for better or worse, but whether this thing is gonna be great or detrimental to society, I think depends first on whether we can steal ourselves mentally, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically to live in this environment. So the old thing is, you know, well, we always adapt, humans always adapt and they said this about television and we're fine and I always say, are we? Are we okay? It's not going that well. We have a reality television star as president now, like clearly television is still exacting its effects on society and so it's not fair to say, well, we just adapted and moved on. So in, you know, sort of in evolutionary terms, like we can maladapt, we can actually develop adaptations that are bad for us, but they're for survival. So that's why, you know, for the church, for Catholics, like go back to the roots, read the church father's, read the mystics, read the, you know, St. Catharine of St. and a Reed St. Teresa the little way. Like ground yourselves in that, call that epistemology, that reality. And then at that point, you're kind of, you're protected, right? You know, it's not that you're casting a spell and protecting yourself, but you are, I think from a spiritual perspective, you can enter into this world with some wisdom and some prudence and make the right decisions. I don't think, you know, someone might decide that means that I just don't have much to do with it at all. Like I'm going to focus on my children, my family life, my this, I'm not going to like become an AI, you know, but someone else might say, well, I work in that industry or I teach or I do this and I need to figure out ways, you know, practical ways in which I can engage this with wisdom and prudence. But, but steal yourself, like have that interior formation, have a spiritual director, have a regular practice of prayer, talk to others about it, and don't get sucked into this sort of the whirlpool of confusion and chaos that technology often brings with it. How often yourself have you been using AI? Is that something that you try to limit or-- Yeah, I mean, I do stupid stuff with it, like log the food I'm eating, like I'm a calories item there. So they stupid like that that you probably do without AI. But I do as an academic, I think I see it as a discovery tool. So I will sometimes ask, I'll treat it like kind of a research assistant and say like, I'm looking at this topic or I'm interested in this, what sources can you recommend? So it's basically just a better search tool. And sometimes it's not. Actually sometimes Google's better. But so, but I always tell my students, like when I was writing my book that I would often use Google, AI wasn't around then, but and it would give me a list of 10 books. And so I'd go to the library and start looking for them. And inevitably when I was in the stacks, I would find the book next to the one that Google recommended that was better than the one that Google recommended. So that was always-- that's been a good lesson. I always remember that and try to teach that to others to say like, don't give up on the slow material, analog, non-digital experience because it can still surprise you going back to our conversation about surprise and grace and contingency. So that's where I think a healthy equilibrium, if we're thinking about the ecosystem analogy, can be maintained. Is if it's like, yeah, tell me some good sources. I'll go to the library and physically look for them. And I might actually find somebody or something else. That's even better. Are there any things that come to mind that have surprised you or changed the way you thought about AI in your-- either your experience using it or-- I don't know-- just recently have there been any things that surprised you in the way that it unfolded or something you've seen-- maybe even with students if it's not yourself personally. But-- Well, kind of a funny surprise, scary surprise with I was logging some food in AI. And my son was sitting next to me and he was complaining about something. And I was like, you've got to stop complaining about this. You're 12 years old. I was being very stern, sort of impatient, which is a bad habit, especially when you're goofing around on your phone or screen. And so I go back to my AI and I had some bread or something. And then it was like, OK, let me know when you want to stop complaining about something. And I was like, wait, I didn't type anything like that. It had to have heard that. Like, so I'm surprised by that. That's kind of a weird example. But I also saw yesterday this device called AlterEgo, which it's a headset, - Hi. - That you wear. And it uses bone conduction, a lot of lingo on headphones and things do. But these guys at MIT have figured out that through the bone conduction, it can basically pick up like, and the brain waves is the right word. But it ends up like turning that into speech. So if you and I were wearing these headsets, we could sit here silently and have a conversation. - Whoa. - And that's where I feel like we're crossing a line. This is why, when you say, "What's the advice?" I was like, "You've got to focus on your interior life "because this thing's gonna go interior, "it's gonna burrow deeper and deeper into the interior life "as we go, right?" - Yeah. - Whether it's literally physically implanted or just the experience of hearing a voice that's not there, that's being projected or whatever. Of course, Apple just came out with their new iPod that are the AirPods that translate in real time. So you can be in a foreign country, be talking, you hear the translation. - Wow. - If you're both wearing them, you can speak in your native language and it's translating in real life. So, we've always had people that have voices in their head, but what happens when a society is willing or okay with, you know, having those voices machine driven in your head to add something like a laugh or like a translation or a conversation, that's where it's like, okay, well, that's a space usually reserved for God's voice, right? We need to practice the silence and stillness to allow it to come in. So if we're importing synthetic voices, then I worry about the contemplative life in general. But so those are things that are surprising me and maybe pushing me back down the doom scale as we look forward. - What would be your book to start with McCleoon? Is it? - Oh gosh. - Is it the understanding media? - The understanding of these, those are seminal work. If you want the more historical in the clue in Gutenberg, Galaxy is really kind of a history of the church, but told through the story of the printing press and its effects on the plaster in Europe. And then he wrote some of his son, Eric McCleoon, one's called Laws of Media, which is a little, I think, easier to digest. And I tell my students and they always chuckle, but there's an interview in a 1970s Playboy magazine that's probably the best kind of synthesis of his thought where he's not doing the aphoristic kind of, you know, philosopher thing, he's just like, this is what I'm up to. And you can find that online without pictures. But it's a good introduction to McCleoon. - Wow, that's awesome. Well, thank you so much for this kind of, I could talk for hours. Where can people go? Where would you want to direct people if they're interested in your work or anything else? - Yeah, so I'm at the McGrath Institute for Church Life and Notre Dame. The web address is McGrath, mcgratht.nd.edu. And in addition to the program I described, we have a whole host of other formation programs for people working in the church. So I would start there. - Awesome. Thanks so much for being here, bro. - Yeah, thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)