There is no app for wisdom

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas has attracted much comment for its passages on artificial intelligence. After 40 years in schools, I find myself more struck by what it says about the formation of young people.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent reflections on AI seem to echo the Pope’s central concern: that technological progress, however impressive, must remain subject to human judgement and moral responsibility. Both appear to recognise that the challenge before us is not merely what machines can do, but what kind of people we wish to become.

Education has never been solely about knowledge and skill. It has always been concerned, too, with judgment, curiosity, empathy and the capacity to act well under uncertainty; qualities that resist automation not because machines are insufficiently clever but because such qualities are inseparable from human experience.

The encyclical’s insistence that technology must serve humanity rather than direct it seems to me particularly apt for those who work with the young, and it is a theme reflected in the Archbishop’s warning against allowing efficiency to eclipse human dignity.

We are not, or ought not to be, in the business of producing efficient operators of powerful tools. We are in the business of producing people who can decide when those tools should be used, when they should not and why the difference matters.

That is a harder thing to teach and a considerably harder thing to examine. A society that optimises relentlessly for the measurable may find, in time, that it has answered the wrong questions with great precision.

I am not, on balance, pessimistic. Children remain much as they were: inquisitive, idealistic and rather better at detecting humbug than adults give them credit for.

The question is whether we have the patience and confidence to go on teaching the things that cannot be downloaded. There is, as yet, no app for wisdom.

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