Associate Professor Victoria Lorrimar delivers the Venerable Mary Aikenhead Oration. PHOTO: Supplied/Catholic Weekly.
The growing influence of artificial intelligence is prompting society to ask profound questions about what it means to be human, according to technology ethicist Associate Professor Victoria Lorrimar, The Catholic Weekly reports.
Delivering the fourth annual oration on the feast of Venerable Mary Aikenhead at Australian Catholic University in North Sydney, she contended that modern culture is increasingly dominated by a mindset of optimisation.
Associate Professor Lorrimar is the director of the Centre for Technology and Human Futures at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Rather than seeing people as beings created for relationship, she said, contemporary society often views individuals as projects to be measured, improved and maximised.
Drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, she argued that this danger arises when efficiency becomes society’s highest value.
“When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimised, rather than as persons called to relationship and communion,” she said.
Her address ranged widely across emerging technologies, biohacking, AI, and transhumanist visions of the future, but returned repeatedly to the theme of human dignity.
Associate Professor Lorrimar began by pointing to recent cultural trends reflected in terms such as “biohacking”, “aura farming” and “rage baiting”, arguing that each of these reveals a preoccupation with self-improvement, engagement metrics, and optimisation.
She cautioned that an increasing reliance on data and measurement can subtly reshape human values. Referring to the American philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s concept of “value capture”, she explained how people often by begin by measuring success using simplified metrics and then allow those metrics to define what matters.
To illustrate her point, she recounted her own experience of becoming fixated on smartwatch step counts. What began as a desire to improve her health eventually became an obsession with meeting daily targets.
After a technical malfunction erased a day’s activity data, she realised she was prepared to sacrifice sleep and wellbeing simply to maintain a digital streak. The episode, she said, showed her how easily deeper values can be replaced by measurable goals.
The same dynamic, she suggested, can be seen in broader technological culture, where optimisation increasingly influences how society understands both individuals and humanity itself. Associate Professor Lorrimar pointed to phenomena ranging from radical longevity projects and cryonics to “looksmaxxing” communities and visions of artificial superintelligence.
Such movements, she argued, often assume that human beings are fundamentally problems to be solved or systems to be upgraded. Against this backdrop, she examined the growing enthusiasm surrounding AI. While acknowledging the remarkable capabilities of current systems, she warned against both utopian and catastrophic narratives.
The excitement generated by AI’s potential, as well as fears of existential risk, can distract attention from how technologies are already affecting people today. Citing University of Queesnland scholar Luke Munn, she noted that both the dream of a technological paradise and predictions of machine-driven apocalypse risk placing excessive faith in technology itself.
The result, she argued, is that public debate can overlook immediate concerns including labour exploitation, corporate concentration of power, and the social impacts of AI deployment. What about the hidden workers who help train artificial intelligence systems, she asked.
Drawing from Magnifica Humanitas, Associate Professor Lorrimar said technologies are never neutral because they embody decisions about what is measured, prioritised and optimised.
“Every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimises,” she said, citing the encyclical.
Associate Professor Lorrimar also revisited themes from the Vatican document Antiqua et Nova, which distinguishes artificial intelligence from human intelligence. While AI can imitate aspects of human reasoning, she noted, the Church insists that human intelligence involves far more than computation.
Human beings are embodied, relational, moral, and spiritual creatures whose dignity does not depend on productivity or technological achievement.
“A person’s worth doesn’t depend on possessing specific skills, cognitive and technological achievements or individual success,” she said, summarising the document’s argument.
Instead, it is grounded in the inherent dignity of the person created in the image of God. Despite her warnings, Associate Professor Lorrimar rejected both technological pessimism and outright rejection of AI. She called for what Pope Leo describes as “vigilance” alongside constructive efforts to develop technologies that genuinely support human flourishing.
Among the possibilities she identified were more transparent models, greater public accountability, consent-based data practices and AI systems that complement rather than replace human creativity.
The challenge for Catholics, she concluded, is not simply to decide whether technologies are useful or harmful, but to discern what vision of the human person they promote.
If society can resist defining itself through optimisation and efficiency alone, she said, there is reason for hope, if we regard others as persons who are created for relationship and communion.
“Actually, I think we can be excited and hopeful about the sorts of technologies that can be developed and used in that paradigm,” she said.
This article by Michael Cook was published in The Catholic Weekly, the publication of the Archdiocese of Sydney.