Guest Post: How does Decision Intelligence help to answer Pope Leo’s AI challenge? (Part 1 of 2)
We can agree that artificial intelligence should serve humanity. A harder question is how to turn that commitment into everyday decisions. Which actions will improve people’s lives? Who might be harmed? What assumptions connect a proposed action to the good we expect it to achieve?
You might be surprised to learn that Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, creates a valuable context for answering these questions. Decision Intelligence has a role to play, too: it’s part of the answer to the Pope’s challenge, providing a recipe for implementing his suggestions: a practical discipline for making goals explicit, connecting possible actions to their likely consequences, and exposing the reasoning so people can examine and challenge it.
A health agency adopting AI might aim to reduce costs. But will its choices also improve access to care, or will AI create barriers for people who need help most? DI makes those competing outcomes and the assumptions behind them explicit.
The Encyclical emphasizes that a commitment to human dignity must shape which outcomes we pursue, whose interests we consider, and how we choose to act. DI can help make those commitments visible in decision making – and help us assess whether our actions are likely to deliver on them.
“Why aren’t the most powerful new technologies being used to solve the world’s most important problems: hunger, poverty, conflict, inequality, employment, disease? What’s missing?”
Link: How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World
—Lorien Pratt, co-inventor of Decision Intelligence
“The most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats and the most amazing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress, will in the long run go against man.”
Magnifica Humanitas: On Human Dignity, Artificial Intelligence, and the Common Good
—Pope Leo XIV
Decision Intelligence (DI) starts with the question, “What is missing between data, technology, and good decision-making? Link frames DI, “in this boundaryless third era of human evolution, we can shape our future as never before.
This book is about getting serious about the purpose that the systems we build will achieve, and working together to understand how to make decisions, which lead to actions, which lead to outcomes. It invites connection between heads in the clouds and feet-on-the-ground actions. Even the most sophisticated computer program must be written with a purpose and a value system, and this requires a human touch
Pope Leo’s encyclical begins with “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, “ and quickly recognizes the key role human decision-making must play in safeguarding humanity. His vision for decision-making is remarkably consonant with Decision Intelligence.
The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination: ‘Never has humanity had such power over itself.’ New technologies open up a horizon extending in directions that are imaginable but not yet fully predictable. This complicates the assessment of their potential impact and the long-term effects they may have on both the dignity of individuals and the common good.
A distinctive contribution of Decision Intelligence is its insistence that decisions themselves become explicit objects of analysis. DI starts not with data or technology, but with the decision. Similarly, Leo’s concern is not merely with technologies but with the ways they shape “decision-making processes.” Both shift attention away from technology itself and toward human decisions that ultimately determine outcomes.
Catholic social teaching offers a moral framework centered on human dignity and the common good. Decision Intelligence helps people carry those commitments into specific choices: whose well-being must we consider, what consequences should we examine, and why do we believe a proposed action will produce the outcomes we seek? Together, they connect the question of what is worth pursuing with practical reasoning about how to pursue it.
This practical connection has deep historical roots. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, defined prudence as “the right reason applied to action.” Decision Intelligence brings tools for applying such reasoning to complex situations: making assumptions visible, exploring likely consequences, and assessing how different choices could advance the outcomes people value.
Pope Leo calls for prudence in how we develop and use AI. Decision Intelligence offers a practical way to support that prudence: making explicit how possible actions could cause outcomes, then evaluating those outcomes against goals informed by human dignity and the common good. Human values also constrain the means we are willing to use in pursuing those goals.
Please join me for Part 2 of this series, where I’ll dig more deeply into how these principles apply to technology.
Nadine Malcolm
Nadine Malcolm has four decades of experience leading cross-functional, multi-national, and geographically distributed teams delivering end-to-end solutions to complex problems to customers in the US, Europe, and Asia. Before coming to Quantellia, Malcolm held management and executive positions in several Silicon Valley startups, including VP of Development at Ascent Logic Corporation which provided systems engineering tools to major aerospace companies and US government projects.
