In 2007, just 6% of Americans used smartphones. That year the iPhone was launched into the world. Just five years later, smartphone usage rose to 54%. Of course, that percentage is much higher today. The iPhone wasn’t the only thing to make its debut in 2007. It was also the year Wyoming Catholic College was founded, with an emphasis on freedom from tech. Today, with the opportunities and challenges of a new era saturated in AI, Wyoming Catholic College (WCC) has wisdom to share about when and how it might be used (and not used).
The state of society and artificial intelligence today
Associate Professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College Dr. Jeremy Holmes defines in four stages the changes in society when technology is introduced:
- The new technology is a luxury, offering an advantage over the way things are usually done.
- Society reshapes itself around the new technology such that the new technology becomes a requirement, a necessity.
- The technology reshapes our perception of the thing we’re doing, redefining the task itself.
- We become unable to imagine life before the technology in any convincing way.
This is true, he explains, for many new technologies, like the car. Consider how cars took the place of horse-drawn carriages and eventually bigger roads were built and cars became commonplace and then a necessity.
Dr. Holmes believes that with AI, we’re still only between steps 1 and 2.
Some kinds of AI have quietly become assumed, while the peddlers of Large Language Models are still working at getting them into all aspects of our lives. Some of our incoming freshmen used AI for writing in high school, but many did not. Consequently, step 3 is not fully underway yet.
Wyoming Catholic College, like the rest of the world, must decide how they want to interact with artificial intelligence. Their approach to education gives them a starting place.
Life experienced differently
Dr. Holmes says that “a society immersed in AI perceives 'knowledge' to mean the kind of thing AI can offer.” However, AI may be able to offer a lot of things, but it can’t offer an experience in reality because “experience includes consciousness and perception and emotions.”
In contrast, he says, “Here at WCC, we ground our education in “poetic knowledge,” which is knowledge through contact with the real itself.”
As in the steps he laid out above, society may shape itself to artificial intelligence. WCC, however, has made the intentional choice to shape itself in a different way.
“The college decided from the beginning,” Academic Dean Dr. Scott Olsson explains, “that our students would be better off without many of these distractions for a time: We would be a place where friends learned together, with books. That is to say, we would prioritize authentic human relationships and experiences.”
In order to establish these priorities, WCC lives by what Dr. Olsson calls a “common rule.”
"Our rule has been that students don't have cell phones. Students are permitted to check out personal devices as the need arises, e.g., to do personal banking, but they don't have them on their person. Our goal is to create and protect an environment where the ubiquitous internet is neither necessary nor assumed. Our first inclinations should be to human presence, not instant messages, to hashing out our ideas with friends, not a large language model."
This rule is something that is not seen as a restriction, but rather an ability to be free -- free from the constant pinging of a phone, free to build relationships in-person and not be beholden to devices.
Technology exists on campus, but, in the words of Dr. Holmes, this way of living and learning, “teaches students that a society, no matter its size, should decide what role a technology will have rather than letting every new technology dictate terms to society. This is as true of the family as it is of a college.”
Is AI good or bad?
Dr. Holmes doesn’t condemn artificial intelligence, but sees it as a tool. Tools can be used for good or for evil.
On the one hand, he says, “If we can relate to LLMs (Large Language Models) as free persons to tools we have created, we will be able to glorify God for what he has done in us: as he made us in his own image, so we always seek to create things like ourselves, and this is one of the ways we are in his image.”
On the other hand, “if we allow ourselves to become dependent on machines for thinking and expressing ourselves and allow the LLMs to reshape our perceptions of rationality itself then we will lose our sense of how we are in God’s image.”
Being attentive to reality at WCC
Dr. Olsson emphasizes that WCC “fasts” from technology in a sense, not because it is bad, but to allow for college students to engage in a truly formative kind of learning during their years there.
Rather than living out the college years battling the distractions of AI or smartphones, Olsson says that at WCC:
Our entire education assumes that all created reality, even the seemingly most obscure or joyless aspects, are signs of love and opportunities for joy. We discover this once we have the powers to attend to reality in its myriad aspects. The mountains can teach you, if you can be present to them. Mathematics is a source of joy, if you can be present to it. There is Scripture, poetry, literature, philosophy. The world abounds with fountains of happiness, if we can attend to them.
