AI: How Can We Help Good Innovate Faster than Evil?

Let’s dream big with an imaginative faith and new AI capabilities that can lift up human dignity. You’ve seen technology revolutions reshape the industries you work in. You have used the internet, cell phones, cloud apps, and social media to create new organizations for areas ranging from consulting, events, and wealth management to retail, marketing services, and media. The revolution happening now with AI is considered the fastest & most powerful technology revolution humanity has seen. Our faith gives us an opportunity to shape this AI revolution and our organizations. 

With disinformation, deep fakes, and other emerging ways to steal from our humanity, it is clear that evil is innovating. AI gives us new ways to strengthen our fight and innovate the good. And we can do it by embracing Catholic Social Teaching (CST). We can use automation tools in our professions to remove manual tasks and make it easier for humans to collaborate with each other, lifting up “the Dignity of Work.” We can use algorithms in our organizations to give voice to the neglected, ignored, and underrepresented, which lifts up “Preferential Option for the Poor.” Like SENT members already have, we can create or use chat agents such as Thaddeus Ruszkowski’s Acquinas Chat or Eduardo Foss’s virtual apologist Justin app. These increase our shared engagement and application of sacred teachings, which lifts up “Participation & Community.” We have longstanding inequalities, resource inefficiencies, social traumas, and other evils we can finally address in a bolder way with AI.

How can the church at all levels take advantage of this opportunity?

The recent Angel Studios movie Cabrini challenged its viewers to commit to building an empire of hope. And we can! You and I, our organizations, and the children we guide have a special moment in history to help the good innovate. With hearts centered in prayer, humility, and virtue, we have new capabilities literally at our fingertips to do good in more powerful ways than we’ve ever seen in human history. This good can go well past the most advanced AI principles — such as transparency, inclusion, and safety — which are championed by technology companies, G7 leaders, and the Catholic Church alike. Evil spirits prowling about the world seeking the ruin of souls aren’t waiting for us to catch up. We have opportunities for our innovation not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. 

Leaders in the SENT community can support each other during this rare opportunity in history. Using your unique strengths, you can showcase in your organizations, communities, and families ways to use innovative tools to lift up human dignity. 

Let’s walk through one example. 

A fast-growth project I support with talented, Catholic wealth managers seeks a first set of investors who care about upholding Catholic Social Teaching (CST) principles. Modernization is overdue in the high-influence wealth management industry that is riddled with inefficiencies and limited moral decision-making. You and I are blessed with USCCB Socially Responsible Investment guidelines to help. Here are four examples of how we can use AI to do more good here. 

1. We can use sentiment analysis to highlight opportunities and challenges for securities in our CST-led portfolios. This will use natural language processing (NLP). 

2. We can eliminate time-consuming, manual tasks for account generation and management. This frees us to offer better human support to more diverse audiences. This will use business process automation (BPA). 

3. We can provide our faith-inspired clients with growth predictions based on multiple variables. This will use neural networks, a supervised machine learning technique identifying the most impactful parameters among vast pools of variables (interest rates, the weather, etc.) 

4. We can lift up our client’s dignity with better-designed human and machine client support. This will use API calls to large language models (LLMs).

Partnering with faith-inspired investors will address the needs of large Catholic dioceses, high net worth individuals, charities, universities and schools, health institutions, endowments, and the communities each supports.

As Saintly builders in each of our industries, we have God-given abilities to help the good innovate. The AI revolution and the unique strengths you bring to your organization, communities, and children offer you a special moment in history to overcome evil with good. How can deeper relationships in your community support you to take small steps forward? 

Andrew is an advisor for Arimathea investing, AI & disaster relief at Google X, and is Co-Founder of a stealth cybersecurity startup. He completed programs for Catholic Social Teaching, engineering, and public policy at Notre Dame, and MBA and Arabic degrees at the Wharton School. He has deployed with undercover special forces as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer and has led AI teams at Microsoft, AWS, and Meta.