Sixth Sunday of Easter - The Singularity of Peace

"La pace sia con tutti voi!"

By 2027 Artificial superintelligences will dictate humanity’s future.

The first quote is from Pope Leo, and those are his first words as Pope – peace be with all of you. The second quote is from Daniel Kokotajilo, ex-engineer at OpenAI who now dedicates himself to trying to raise the alarm over AI.

And those are two different visions of the world. One is a vision of peace. The other is a vision of fear—that AI superintelligences will soon be running our lives, and we should be afraid. We should be very afraid.

I think one of those visions is the perspective of Christ, and one of them is not.

In the Gospel today, what does Christ say to us? “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”

That’s the perspective of Jesus Christ. That’s the perspective of the risen Lord—not a perspective of fear and paranoia, but a perspective of peace. Because peace is the opposite of fear. Peace drives out fear. And the peace of Christ is what God wants us to receive during this Easter—not fear.

As a society, in case you haven’t noticed, we are somewhat addicted to fear.

I mean, we think fear is a bad thing, right? We think we don’t want to be afraid. But I’m not so sure of that. Look at the movies people watch, the experiences they go to, the doom-scrolling—I don’t even really know what doom-scrolling is—but it’s sort of like scrolling your phone looking through all the bad news, absorbing all the bad news, addicted to watching all the bad news that’s pumped into our brains from our television sets.

We seem to be addicted to fear. How could that be? Fear is not a good thing. We supposedly don’t want to be afraid—and yet, what are we doing? We’re consuming fear constantly.

And that’s where these sorts of pseudo-prophets predicting the AI apocalypse fit in. They play into our fears. Oh no! There’s this thing that’s going to take over our lives. It’s going to destroy everything as we know it. We have to be very afraid of this.

It’s interesting—this particular article, “AI 2027”, was making the rounds, and gaining quite a bit of traction. And I read the thing, and I was like: there’s nothing actually in here that’s any different than any science fiction work you’ve ever read.

We are not about to invent a superintelligence that will replace us, for the very simple reason that we cannot do that. We have no idea even how human intelligence works.

Yes, we’ve made some very impressive tools—these ChatGPT, large language model-type things—that can eerily predict what we’re going to say, or give us strange answers. But those things, they’re taking the entire internet and scrubbing it for all the collected information of humanity, and then they’re able to spit it out to us—a little bit better than a Google search, right? But Google search is the same thing. These things have been around for a long time.

They’re not evolving into our digital masters that will replace us. Because that’s not possible. It’s philosophically, logically, and practically absurd.

But that’s what science fiction is, right? Science fiction is always spinning us visions of the future in which aliens destroy New York, or something goes crazy, or lizards come out of the ocean, or something like that, right? There’s always these crazy scenarios we watch that are scary—but hopefully, we know the difference between fiction and reality. Hopefully, we know the difference between something that is truly scary and something that is true.

And that’s what these things are. That’s what these AI projections are.

Now, that’s not to say that AI as a technology isn’t going to be disruptive, or isn’t going to affect our society. It is. It’s going to change the way that people work. It’s going to put some people out of business.

But I can tell you—the printing press put a lot of people out of business. All those people whose business it was to copy books by hand? They were put out of business. Technology evolves. It changes. There are effects. Those effects aren’t all good for all people. Some people are disenfranchised, and those people need to be helped.

And that’s our job as Christians: to help people adapt to a different situation.

That’s the reason why Pope Leo took the name “Leo.” He said that in a speech he gave a few days later. Pope Leo XIII was the great pope of the Industrial Revolution, of all the changes that were happening in society around the turn of the last century. And Pope Leo XIV took the name “Leo” precisely to echo Leo XIII.

Leo XIII, in that context, wrote Rerum Novarum, his great social encyclical, to advocate for the rights of workers—workers who were being affected by these societal changes, as industry was changing the way the world worked. And Pope Leo XIV said that in this age of AI, in this digital revolution, his goal is to do the same thing: to advocate for those who are affected by these changes, to advocate for the dignity of human beings—that human beings not be reduced to cogs or made the tools of unrestrained capital.

That’s the point of Leo XIV. That’s the point of us as Christians.

But it is not our job to succumb to fear in some possible future that hasn’t come about.

There are lots of possible futures. That’s why they’re “possible.” I mean, everybody during the last half of the last century was terrified of nuclear apocalypse—which is, by the way, still just as possible as it was then. But nobody thinks about it anymore. That was the big thing everyone was afraid of.

We’ll always find something to be afraid of. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. We just get fixated on different things.

And if our conception of peace—if our freedom from fear—depends on the external circumstances of the world, we will never be free from fear.

There are so many things that could go wrong with us at any time. I used to open retreats with a section of a book I had, talking about the probability of an asteroid striking us—and the probability is actually quite high, and our ability to foresee it is quite low. Anything could go wrong at any time.

We don’t even know how earthquakes work. Those things can be devastating. There’s all sorts of things that could go wrong. And so we’re always finding something to be afraid of.

We replace one fear with another, justifying living in fear all the time and not being at peace.

That’s not what God wants for us. That’s not the message of Easter.

He comes to bring us a message of peace.

Because peace is not absence. It’s not the absence of fear. That’s what we tend to think when we hear the word peace.

My parents used to laugh at this bumper sticker they saw: “Visualize world peace.” Of course, it was making fun of bumper stickers that said, “Visualize world peace.” But that’s not the kind of peace Christ gives.

It’s not something we can visualize and magically bring about. Even if the whole world stopped fighting each other—that still wouldn’t be the peace Christ comes to bring. It’s not merely the absence of conflict. Because something could always go wrong at any time.

The peace that Christ brings is something different.

It’s not an absence—it’s a presence. It’s something that can be with you.

That’s the peace Christ comes to give us. It’s a presence within us. It’s a way of being. And it’s the way of being that is love.

Peace is security in relationship. But not merely relationship with another person—because anything could happen to any other person. There’s always relativity in all our relationships. Even though we know those relationships will continue in heaven, every relationship we have here is fragile.

But the peace that is with us—the peace that is present—that is relationship with God. With the source of everything. With the one who guides everything. Who holds everything in his hands.

That is the peace Christ wants to give us.

Because if we have that peace, then all these other things that could happen—they don’t matter.

Everything is held in the palm of his hand.

We don’t have to worry that AI is going to go crazy and take over and reduce us all to slaves—if it doesn’t eliminate us—because AI is held in the palm of God’s hand.

Everything in the world is held in the palm of God’s hand.

If we trust in God, then all will be well. Not necessarily good—it’s often not good. But all will be well.

We will be okay.

We can have peace in that relationship.

And to that end, I think it’s good to end with those beautiful words Saint Paul left us:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? Nay… neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come… nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Amen.