AI and the Human Person I Prof. Jordan Wales

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Jordan Wales critically examines the relationship between artificial intelligence and human personhood through the lens of Christian theology, exploring how AI challenges traditional notions of intelligence, consciousness, and relationality.

This lecture was given on June 9th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Jordan Wales is Associate Professor and John and Helen Kuczmarski Chair in Theology at Hillsdale College, where he teaches historical theology. His scholarship—appearing in journals such as Augustinian Studies, the Journal of Moral Theology, and AI & Society—focuses on early Christianity as well as theology and Artificial Intelligence. Holding degrees in Engineering (B.S.), Cognitive Science (M.Sc.), and Theology (Dip.Theol., M.T.S., Ph.D.), he is a member of the AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture, under the Dicastery of Culture and Education at the Holy See; a fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion; and a fellow of the Centre for Humanity and the Common Good.

Keywords: AI Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, Christian Theology, Consciousness, Emmanuel Augustine, Harari Yuval Noah, Intelligence, Personhood, Silmarillion, Trinity

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast.
0:05.9	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.2	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.2	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	to mystic institute.org.
0:24.6	The popular historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari often declares intelligence is not consciousness.
0:33.6	Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things.
0:41.3	Now, for Harari, the problems that matter are those that we can
0:46.3	objectively define and measure in the material world.
0:50.3	So, climate change, material poverty, energy production and distribution, political organization,
0:57.9	brain chemistry, disease, and the last enemy, death.
1:02.6	And these are to be resolved by manipulating the material factors that define them.
1:09.6	In our wondrous time, Harari and many others hope that the
1:14.3	intelligence, the problem-solving ability, that will bring about these resolutions, will come
1:20.0	in the form of AI. While nobody yet claims that we have reached the point where artificial
1:26.0	general intelligence can solve all the world's material problems,
1:30.3	AI certainly is increasingly and impressively part of our worlds.
1:36.3	It answers our questions, it writes our essays, not this one.
1:40.3	It chooses the advertisements that we see, and it makes medical and legal decisions for us,
1:46.3	sometimes of dubious quality, or at least it offers us plausible advice. AI systems perform
1:53.4	many functions that were once deemed the exclusive province of human beings, so that today
1:59.7	there are many who worry about the future of human work
	...

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