It is argued that predictive systems must be understood as formative environments that shape attention, imagination, and desire through patterned repetition and the strategic management of salience.
Abstract
Contemporary theological engagement with artificial intelligence (AI) has been dominated by applied ethics, focusing on bias, surveillance, and governance. This approach often treats algorithms as external instruments subject to moral regulation. This article argues that predictive systems must be understood as formative environments that shape attention, imagination, and desire through patterned repetition and the strategic management of salience. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s account of
habitus and the doctrine of the invisibilis missio of the Holy Spirit
, I propose that certain algorithmic architectures function as rival ecologies of habituation. These systems pre-structure deliberation by compressing the temporal interval between stimulus and assent and reinforcing probabilistic continuity with the past. Against this extractive economy of attention, sanctification is interpreted not as self-optimisation but as the Spirit’s infusion of charity, which reorders love and restores the temporal spaciousness required for mature freedom. By situating AI theology within pneumatology rather than metaphysical speculation about machine agency, the article reframes the central question: not whether AI can think, but how predictive systems participate in the formation of human desire. It offers a Thomistic grammar for discerning the limits of prediction and articulating a theological account of freedom in an age of algorithmic mediation.
Contemporary AI systems are increasingly designed to reduce uncertainty, ambiguity, and cognitive burden. This article argues that such systems do not merely expand human capacities but progressively externalize forms of judgment and existential burden that Christian traditions have historically understood as necessary conditions for the cultivation of moral agency. Drawing on the theological anthropologies of Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the article develops a theological-anthropological critique of what it terms optimization culture: the normative logic through which the reduction of friction and existential difficulty becomes a dominant telos of technological design. Contemporary articulations of this logic are examined through the work of Jacques Ellul, Byung-Chul Han, Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and William Davies. The article argues that AI systems shaped by this logic risk progressively externalizing the practices of disciplined attention, existential responsibility, and costly judgment through which mature moral agency has historically been cultivated. In response, it proposes a formative anthropology of technology as a framework for evaluating AI not only according to functional criteria such as safety or efficiency, but according to the kinds of human beings such systems actively help to form.
Åke Elden· Studies in Christian Ethics· 0 citations
The concept of “alienated intelligence” is introduced to critically examine contemporary cultural perceptions of artificial intelligence to argue that certain visions of AI function as cultural projections of human cognitive capacities that become externalized, idealized, and reified in technological systems.
The proposition that agentic artificial intelligence may precipitate a depletion of collective cognitive capital has circulated with unusual velocity in both scholarly and public discourse. The present paper offers a deliberately heterodox reading of the dynamic model advanced by Acemoglu, Kong and Ozdaglar (2026). Rather than reconstructing the formal apparatus or replicating its notation, we reposition the argument within three underutilized scholarly streams: the cognitive ergonomics of human-machine collaboration, the institutional ecology of knowledge stewardship, and the developmental psychology of novice expertise formation. We introduce a phase-space taxonomy that maps commons trajectories as functions of effort elasticity and knowledge complementarity, and we advance a governance typology calibrated to distinct cognitive levels - declarative, procedural, causal, and metacognitive. Drawing upon recent experimental evidence on neural offloading (Kosmyna et al., 2025), educational neuroscience (Lodge and Loble, 2026), and critical-thinking erosion under AI assistance, we argue that the collapse narrative, while theoretically coherent, overstates uniformity and understates adaptive capacity. The paper supplies a governance matrix organized by cognitive level and institutional lever. We conclude that the salient policy challenge is not the prevention of an inevitable collapse but the design of polycentric stewardship regimes that render the commons robust to heterogeneity in human responsiveness.
It is argued that contemporary artificial intelligence is best understood as a symptom and accelerator of modern nihilism rather than as a neutral instrument or proto-subject because it allows values to persist as calculable effects rather than contested commitments, thereby insulating human agents from the burden of judgment.
This article examines the emergence of a hybrid and collective form of judgment within the context of generative and recommendation-based artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It argues that these systems actively configure two essential dimensions of human judgment: truth as unconcealment (aletheia), and opportunity as the temporal opening in which one decides or acts in relation to what appears as true (kairos). This thesis draws on Éric Sadin’s critical phenomenology of AI, which claims that this technological form institutes an algorithmic regime of truth that imposes itself not through coercion, but through a kind of “soft Leviathan” that seduces and organizes user behavior by means of “truths” that are no longer revealed, but rather instantly delivered through persuasive and pleasing options, programmatically produced and made available to users. These options are optimized through every interaction and opportunistically capture the moments of deliberation and action, ultimately reconfiguring both the temporality and the lived experience of judgment itself. We propose a different reading grounded in postphenomenology, which maintains that the interaction between users and these systems (i.e., their condition of embodiment) results in a mutual constitution from which new hybrid forms of agency emerge, giving rise to a technologically mediated and collectively automated regime of judgment.
Roberto Pizarro Contreras, Zhitong Zhao, Guihong Zhang· Humanities and Social Scienc...· 0 citations
The paper’s central argumentative shift is to change the narrative from bias mitigation to bias management—treating bias not as a defect to be corrected but as an ongoing condition to be governed.
Gabriela Arriagada-Bruneau· Science and Engineering Ethi...· 0 citations
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