I’m surprised by your confusion at Pope Leo’s juxtaposition of Babel and Nehemiah, as the metaphor seemed rather clear to me, while the ‘candidate interpretations’ you provided feel very modern and out of place. It’s possible that this comes down to differences in exegetical tradition between Christian and Jewish schools of thought, in which case I’m probably not properly equipped to bridge that gap. Assuming not, however, I’ll give a stab at my understanding.
Starting from the text: the builders of Babel say
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
There are a few things I want to point out. First, the intentions of the builders are directly self-glorifying: to make a name for themselves, to aggrandize themselves through great works. Secondly, the motivation for the construction is a sense of vulnerability: they fear the prospect of being ‘scattered abroad’, and seek to create an anchoring-point to hold their population in one place. Yet this is directly opposed to God’s prior command to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”, and (in Catholic thought, at least) this of command is not made out of pique, but because it is the proper orientation for human life. That is to say: God has laid out a plan for mankind; mankind is afraid of what will happen if they let that plan unfold, because doing so would mean giving up control; they seek to forestall God’s plan through their own power; in doing so, they harm themselves. God’s subsequent intervention merely restores the proper order of the world.
The parallels to AI seem clear. Those who seek to build AI do so largely out of a combination fear, greed, and pride (also greed, but that’s perhaps less relevant for the Babel analogy so I’ll ignore it for now). The leaders of the labs are afraid of China (or another lab) winning a ‘race to AGI’, and all harbor some level of a prideful desire to see their own worldview ‘conquer the lightcone’. The engineers on the ground have FOMO plus the obvious vainglory of working at a cool lab and being acclaimed by their peers. More than either of those though, everyone is afraid of death, and many AI boosters claim that the risk of AI is justified either because it’ll fix death or because we’ll destroy ourselves anyways if we don’t build AGI soon. The Catholic view, of course, is that mankind cannot actually destroy ourselves (because we have to make it to the Second Coming), death is a natural part of life (and indeed how you get to heaven), and that God’s plan should+will determine the future of the lightcone. So AI is the modern Babel because it is man’s attempt to defy God’s plan through a misplaced sense of confidence in our own capabilities and our own sense of what the world ‘should be like’.
I’m surprised by your confusion at Pope Leo’s juxtaposition of Babel and Nehemiah, as the metaphor seemed rather clear to me, while the ‘candidate interpretations’ you provided feel very modern and out of place. It’s possible that this comes down to differences in exegetical tradition between Christian and Jewish schools of thought, in which case I’m probably not properly equipped to bridge that gap. Assuming not, however, I’ll give a stab at my understanding.
Starting from the text: the builders of Babel say
There are a few things I want to point out. First, the intentions of the builders are directly self-glorifying: to make a name for themselves, to aggrandize themselves through great works. Secondly, the motivation for the construction is a sense of vulnerability: they fear the prospect of being ‘scattered abroad’, and seek to create an anchoring-point to hold their population in one place. Yet this is directly opposed to God’s prior command to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”, and (in Catholic thought, at least) this of command is not made out of pique, but because it is the proper orientation for human life. That is to say: God has laid out a plan for mankind; mankind is afraid of what will happen if they let that plan unfold, because doing so would mean giving up control; they seek to forestall God’s plan through their own power; in doing so, they harm themselves. God’s subsequent intervention merely restores the proper order of the world.
The parallels to AI seem clear. Those who seek to build AI do so largely out of a combination fear, greed, and pride (also greed, but that’s perhaps less relevant for the Babel analogy so I’ll ignore it for now). The leaders of the labs are afraid of China (or another lab) winning a ‘race to AGI’, and all harbor some level of a prideful desire to see their own worldview ‘conquer the lightcone’. The engineers on the ground have FOMO plus the obvious vainglory of working at a cool lab and being acclaimed by their peers. More than either of those though, everyone is afraid of death, and many AI boosters claim that the risk of AI is justified either because it’ll fix death or because we’ll destroy ourselves anyways if we don’t build AGI soon. The Catholic view, of course, is that mankind cannot actually destroy ourselves (because we have to make it to the Second Coming), death is a natural part of life (and indeed how you get to heaven), and that God’s plan should+will determine the future of the lightcone. So AI is the modern Babel because it is man’s attempt to defy God’s plan through a misplaced sense of confidence in our own capabilities and our own sense of what the world ‘should be like’.