Embracing fragility: Vulnerability, humanity matter in tech age | Opinion

Our fragility is an essential part of our humanity: We begin life dependent on the love of others, we live and work in delicate communities, we fall ill and die. Life is vulnerable to suffering, loss and sorrow.

It is natural to want to overcome our finitude. But the desire for invulnerability can become dangerously inhuman.

Pope Leo XIV makes this point in his recent encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” warning against the strange desire to transcend our suffering humanity.

“Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship,” the pope writes.

He also criticizes unethical artificial intelligence and “the promise of the perfect machine.” The challenges of our era go far beyond the dream of building machines that think.

So-called “transhumanists” also dream of perfecting the biological machine known as the human body. Transhumanists advocate for using technology to transcend human limits. Apparently, some people are busily “maxxing” (or optimizing) everything from looks to longevity. And some want to improve human offspring through genetic screening and enhancement.

An example occurred last week in the “Enhanced Games” in Las Vegas, where athletes were encouraged to exploit performance-enhancing drugs. This is part of a larger trend of widespread use of drugs and surgeries to help lose weight, build muscle, improve cognition, remove signs of aging and generally tinker with the body and the brain.

The pope warns that the dream of human perfection can have pernicious implications.

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy,” the pope wrote.

The dream of perfection is misleading and, ultimately, irrational. How would we measure perfection? And why would we think that invulnerability is attainable or desirable?

The history of efforts to establish paradigms of human perfection is full of dangerous ideas. Supremacists of various sorts think they are superior to others in terms of race, culture or gender. What would human perfection look like? White or black? Male or female? A stoutly built powerlifter or a skinny distance runner?

Humanity is diverse. Each of us is fascinating, and none of us is perfect.

This point about diversity applies to AI as well. AI is good at processing information. But human experience also includes emotional sensitivity, dread, desire, boredom, wonder and joy. AI magnifies one aspect of our humanity, while ignoring the rest.

Moreover, perfection is not attainable. Logicians and computer scientists have long wrestled with problems related to incompleteness and undecidability, which undermine the dream of a perfect computing machine.

Theologians and mystics have wrestled with related problems. Human experience is partial and fallible. The world is evolving and unstable. The idea of God as a perfect being is only understood in contrast with our imperfect, mortal existence. But we are not gods. The vastness of the universe shows that we are tiny cogs in a cosmic machine.

It is understandable that we would dream of perfection, given our flaws and the suffering of life. But ancient wisdom advises that instead of pursuing perfection, we should develop perseverance and practice humility. The difficulties of life should be embraced as opportunities to learn and grow.

Muscles strengthen under tension. The mind grows through the struggle to learn. And compassion develops as we suffer and mourn.

No person is perfect, and there are no superheroes. There is no shortcut, pill or machine that can lead us to happiness. We must learn to live with our vulnerability.

The dream of perfection is a distraction from the task of living. This life is fragile and fleeting. A good life does not require invulnerability. Rather, it requires humility, effort and acceptance.

Andrew Fiala is a professor of philosophy and director of The Ethics Center at Fresno State.