Moral responsibility in the age of automation

By Sarah-Leah Pimentel

Youth Month is celebrated in South Africa in June. Youth Day is commemorated annually on 16 June to honour the courage and sacrifices of the 1976 Youth Uprising. 2026 marks the 50th Anniversary thereof.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with my godson. He is in that exciting and agonising phase of life where he is thinking about the career he wants to pursue. During our meal, he expressed his interest in pursuing a specific trade. This was a very different direction from our last conversation when he was thinking about academic studies. My response was reactive rather than pondered: “What a great idea. You’re future-proofing your income prospects against AI!”

My godson looked at me quizzically. I don’t think he expected that response. Perhaps he thought I would continue to press him to go to university. He also knows that I work in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Why did I not suggest technology studies? 

Inasmuch as I’m excited by AI, I remain sceptical about whether its threats outweigh its benefits. I have implemented AI in my daily work. I use it to build workflow pipelines, perform routine calculations, summarise tedious content and refine my overly verbose emails. AI has made me more efficient and has allowed our company to standardise and streamline its operations. I am constantly in awe of the advancements it has brought to medicine and of the new insights from previously unseen patterns or connections in large datasets. 

My fear, however, is that transnational AI companies are selling us the dream of future potential while remaining silent about the human, societal, and environmental costs. Thousands of jobs have already been lost to a few lines of code, particularly in the technology, financial, and media sectors. Computer vision algorithms can select military targets, often with devastating consequences. We saw this recently when a US military strike mistook a girls’ school for a military base in Iran, allegedly because of a geospatial data error. The human need for water and energy will increasingly compete with the massive data-processing centres that are the lifeblood of AI. Finally, the ethical dimension of potentially biased and skewed algorithms trained on data that disproportionately represents the knowledge paradigms of highly industrialised nations risks excluding billions of people in the Global South from the benefits of AI.

Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, has deliberately chosen a title that prioritises the intrinsic value and purpose of a “magnificent humanity” over technological fascination. He reminds us of the inherent God-given dignity of each human person. Technology exists to complement human initiatives and creativity, not to supplant them.  

The encyclical reminds us that considerations about the common good, the option for the poor and marginalised, the equitable distribution of resources, and the protection of the environment require human judgement and discernment. Pope Leo warns us that while machines can detect patterns, we cannot abdicate responsibility for moral decisions that affect the most vulnerable, the very people that technological developments often overlook. 

My biggest fear is that we too easily trust AI outputs without understanding how the algorithms that run them actually work, the biases they contain, and how they can be manipulated by human engineers for evil. Quick answers to complex questions too easily deter us from thinking critically about their application to our own unique contexts. In a quasi-humorous incident, the South African Department of Communications and Digital Technologies released its draft of the South African National AI Policy last month. It was almost immediately withdrawn when it was revealed to have been AI-generated and replete with hallucinations.

If our government seems prepared to enact a national AI framework by unthinkingly lifting an AI suggestion, they have already failed on moral and responsible decision-making. Have our elected officials considered the impact of AI on our local job market in an already depressed economy? Have they considered the range of skills that need to be taught at schools and tertiary institutions to equip the next generation of learners to thrive in a technology-first mindset? Have they weighed up these decisions against the reality that thousands of schools still lack a reliable electrical supply, let alone fully equipped computer labs?

These unanswered questions should prompt us to pause. We are still in time to shape our future: not by denying that the technological revolution is here but by determining the gaps that AI can fill without sacrificing human livelihoods.

As I finished up dinner with my godson, I reminded him that none of us can see the future. But we can prepare for it in faith through prayer and discernment, accompanied by hope and confidence that God now invites his generation to use the age into which it has been called, with its opportunities and challenges, to ensure that the technology they will master will be used for the benefit of the whole of society. I certainly have far more hope in our youth than I do in an AI agent!