As the world of technology spins faster and faster, responses can vary to the rapid pace of change and innovation. Fear, excitement, caution – everyone has an idea of how to respond. What does Catholic tradition and faith have to say?
As the world of technology spins faster and faster, responses can vary to the rapid pace of change and innovation. Fear, excitement, caution – everyone has an idea of how to respond. What does Catholic tradition and faith have to say?
Dr. Joseph Vukov, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago and author of Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence, joins Health Calls to offer his thoughts on what Catholicism has to offer to this technological moment. Dr. Vukov and Brian discuss specific ways that technology can benefit and disrupt the mission of Catholic health care, all while keeping in mind the truth of what it means to be “human” in a digital age.
Resources
Purchase Dr. Vukov’s book, Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Reardon (00:07):
Welcome to Health Calls, the podcast of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. I'm your host, Brian Reardon, and this is episode two of our series on technology and humanity. And in this episode we're going to be talking technology change and the Catholic response, our guest who I will introduce in just a moment and bring into the conversation is Dr. Joseph Vukov. He's associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. And joining me to kind of kick off the conversation is Josh Matejka. He's the executive producer of Health Calls. Welcome Josh.
Josh Matejka (00:49):
Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here.
Brian Reardon (00:51):
So Josh, we talked to Tom in our episode one, we wanted now to ground ourselves in our Catholic identity as we move throughout the season. So I guess my question for you is, how did Dr. Vukov come to our attention?
Josh Matejka (01:07):
Well, when we were planning this season, Dr. Vukov was actually one of the first people I remember that we talked about because as we were doing our research, obviously we'd never want to lose the elements of our ministry that is Catholic. And so as I was looking at the Catholic response to this rapid innovation and change in the technological industry, Dr. Vukov's book, staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence that was released earlier this year came to my attention and I was able to read through it a little bit. And what I was struck by was obviously the Catholic nature of it, but how Dr. Vukov really touches on all of the different areas that technology is impacting our lives. We tend to boil things down to one area or another that really matters to us. A lot of people care about privacy, so they're concerned about how AI and technology affects their privacy, maybe how it affects the labor market.
(02:03):
Is it going to take my job away from me? And of course he addresses those things, but he also discusses health equity, the labor markets, the environment, our own wellbeing, the way that he's able to touch all of these different areas really opens up the conversation in a way that I think can bring you out of your own anxiety about the one thing that maybe you care about and also ground your knowledge in a more holistic way. So I was really interested in what he has to say and I'm really excited that he's on the show with us today.
Brian Reardon (02:33):
Yeah, I am too. And I think your point about him sort of grounding this series because some of the issues you just rattled off are going to be future episodes. So I think it's good to kind of get that sort of foundational perspective from an academic. So with that, let's go ahead and bring in Dr. Joseph Vuca from Loyola University. Joe, thanks for joining us.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (02:52):
Thanks so much for having me.
Brian Reardon (02:53):
So let's start off with this notion that, again, Josh was saying people are obviously concerned, maybe there's anxiety about where is all of this technology taking us as human beings. And so from your perspective, from both inside and outside the healthcare sector, what is your perspective on the speed in which change is happening with technology in our lives?
Dr. Joseph Vukov (03:17):
Yeah, no, I think sometimes the anxiety about the rate of technological change and just the breadth of technological change that's happening right now, especially, but not only including artificial intelligence, it can actually, I think sometimes be distracting from the more important questions we need to be asking. It can be really easy to fall into the pattern of thinking that says, oh no, where the job's going to go? How is the nature of work going to be upended? How is everything going to change now that AI is coming? Is the terminator coming to get me? And you can kind of spiral off into ever worse sort of anxious questions. But I think what that actually does or can do, even while some of those questions are important ones to ask, it can distract us from the really crucial and important decision making when it comes to implementing technology that we need to make right now.
(04:08):
So sometimes it can kind of inflate these questions to be becoming something so big that we can't actually address them. Whereas I think that as is the case with other technologies when it comes to new tech like ai, it really is the things that are going to be most important is how we incorporate artificial intelligence into our own work sectors, into healthcare, into our own personal lives. And I think by bringing those questions back down to earth, it both makes them less anxiety producing, but also makes them the sort of thing that we can and in fact need to grapple with in our everyday lives. So yeah, I think that sometimes the big worries about where is everything heading can really distract us from the questions that we need to be asking, which is how do I make decisions in the moment for the sea change that really is coming? Because AI will change a lot of parts about our lives. New tech will change a lot of parts about our lives and we need to be able to grapple with those questions in real and practical ways.
Brian Reardon (05:03):
And we're going to talk a lot about the professional implications in healthcare for technology. Let's start maybe about the personal perspective. And again, you're an academic, you've researched this and it's something that I'm very interested in is how is all of this technology affecting how we are behaving as humans and interacting with one another? Can you start maybe with that perspective? Let's look at the personal way and just from your perspective again, how is all this technology that's around us and seeming to expand rapidly impacting our neuroscience or how again, our brains work?
Dr. Joseph Vukov (05:41):
Yeah, I think one thing that all of this new technology is doing is it's really challenging us to think about who we are as human beings in the first place. So I do work at the intersection of neuroscience technology philosophy, but I'm initially trained as a philosopher. So I always come back to these big questions about what makes us human beings and one thing that's distinctive about specifically modern technology. So I'm thinking here about not only artificial intelligence, but the internet and social media and these kinds of technologies zoom all the sorts of things that have become more and more parts of our both personal and private and professional lives. These technologies push us to a way of living and a way of interacting with each other. That's in many ways disembodied. So right now, as a perfect example, we're recording this podcast over the internet.
(06:40):
There's all sorts of technology interfering or allowing for us to have this conversation, but we're not in a room next to each other would've been just a few decades ago. And all of these modern technologies in some ways push us towards that space in which we think about ourselves and we think about our interactions as disembodied, as computational, as the sorts of things that an artificial intelligence could replicate as quantifiable. So think about our interactions with social media and how much stock we place. Maybe we wouldn't admit to it, but likes that we get on social media retweets, we get things like that. And the more that we engage in that kind of life and the more that we place value in that kind of life, the more that we start to understand human life is looking like that and taking it away from our very embodied ways of being in the world. And the fact that human life is more than what can be quantified that more than what can be computed more than what can be telegraphed over the airwaves.
Brian Reardon (07:43):
It's sort of like having a digital persona. When does your digital persona stop? And where does your sort of human persona begin and where does the two bleed together?
Dr. Joseph Vukov (07:54):
Exactly. And I think a lot of us would like to say, well, of course my real persona is not my digital persona. But then you look at your social media activity and you get excited. The real you gets excited when digital you is doing well on social media.
Brian Reardon (08:09):
It's like a dopamine.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (08:10):
So you get those dopamine hits. So I think a question that we need to keep coming back to is, and you brought in the dopamine example, is the way that our embodied lives are affected by our digital lives. And that those two things really can bleed together. And it's really important though that as we become more and more digital, as we engage in our professional lives and our personal lives more and more in digital spaces, that we keep reminding ourselves that's not the whole story, that's not our real lives.
Brian Reardon (08:37):
And the reason I wanted to bring that up is because again, healthcare is a personal encounter. It's not just you're on an assembly line checking a widget. There is that personal connection. And so I think it's important particularly in Catholic healthcare because it's not only the personal connection, it's also the spirituality of the patient that you're caring for. So how does that, I want us kind of shift a little bit into the topic of this episode and that is this sort of technologies all around us. It's part of our persona in some respects. How is our Catholic response to that, particularly in Catholic healthcare where we're embodying a ministry of Christ in healing and care.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (09:20):
When we start talking about the difference between our digital lives and our real lives or our lives that can be quantified in terms of likes on social media or the aspects of our working lives or personal lives that can be automated by an artificial intelligence, I think near everyone has what I take to be right reaction or intuition that that's not the real thing, right? That's sort of
(09:44):
Maybe a part of our lives, but that's not the real thing. Our real lives are embodied. They're in person, they're person to person, and that's what our real lives look like. What other frameworks don't have though, and that the Catholic framework does is a long, long history of ways of talking about the human person that makes sense of why our digital lives can't be the real thing and why that's not at least the whole story, the Catholic tradition, we have a whole bunch of different ways of talking about the human being. We're soul and body together. We are created in the image of God, we are bears of infinite worth and human dignity and all these ways of talking give us this much more robust sense of who we are as human beings. That again, a lot of times our increasingly technological lives make us forget about.
(10:37):
And the Catholic tradition brings us back to that. So I think in Catholic healthcare it's of course that as we're making decisions in that context, we're following that richer understanding of ourselves as human beings because that's the tradition that we're coming out of. But I think it actually goes beyond that because I think that in Catholic healthcare and in other sectors as well, we really also can be thought leaders here because I think other people too have that same intuition, that same gut feeling that there's more to us than what can be replicated by an ai, but they don't always have the language to talk about that. Whereas coming from a Catholic perspective, again, whether that's in healthcare or outside of healthcare, we have the language in the tradition that other people right now I think are really longing for. And it's really an opportunity for us in Catholic healthcare, other Catholic sectors to be thought leaders and say we have a tradition that really can help guide us as we're struggling with some of these big issues in an increasingly technological age.
Brian Reardon (11:40):
And one of the things that we've talked about on this program is, for example, two areas really formation, which is again the work we do with our colleagues to really allow them to understand the charism or the heritage of our founding congregations of what it means to work in Catholic healthcare and also spiritual care and both of the delivery of spiritual care and the work around formation of colleagues. That's happening more and more. As you said, we're now on a zoom call talking to each other. Exactly. It's happening more and more in a virtual world. So how do we bring forth that humanity piece through the technologies that we are just, I don't want to say required, but in some ways I guess we are, we're required to use in order to reach colleagues and patients.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (12:27):
So I think there's a couple of things to say. The first is that I see, again, like you were saying, it's all over. We are on Zoom. I'm on zoom all the time now. It's a way that I do a lot of my meetings. We're using technology to chart and we're using it. I'm a teacher. I prepare for lessons, all these things. I think one thing is to do what we've already been doing and to call attention to the fact that that thing that you're doing when you're at work, that thing that you're in doing when you're interacting with a computer screen that maybe is necessary, that also is probably capable of achieving good things. I take it, this thing we're doing right now, we're recording a podcast that would've been really difficult to make happen in person, but not half as difficult to make happen remotely.
(13:10):
It's a good thing. So there's all sorts of good things that we can do, but also putting our finger on what it is that we're missing there when we understand whether it's a provider or a patient in purely terms that can be captured by an ai, whether that's numbers or whether that's something else. Really putting a finger on it and saying, yeah, that can be helpful and it can be helpful to integrate AI into health systems. It can be helpful to integrate other technologies into our working lives, but notice that there's something missing there and notice that it's something really important as we do use that technology more and more for good things, that we're always keeping an eye on the thing that it doesn't do well and helping others see that that's a really crucial part of the puzzle that we don't want to miss. Again, I think that coming from a Catholic context, this is not something that's uniquely Catholic. We just have a distinctive way of being able to put a finger on that and talk about that.
Brian Reardon (14:08):
In the last episode, which I know you had a chance to listen to, our guests talked about the balancing of efficiencies that technology can bring and that need to again, stay human to keep that connection between two individuals. From your perspective, and maybe I think you wrote about this in your book, staying human in an era of artificial intelligence, any advice or perspectives you could give to those working in Catholic healthcare of how they balance out, okay, this technology's allowing me to do my job more efficiently, quicker, maybe more effectively improve outcomes, but also that caution, that leaning too far into that could really take away a key element of the healing process, which is that human one-on-one connection.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (14:53):
Yeah. I think what I always try and ask people to reflect on, whether it's at a level of personal use of technology or whether it's at a system-wide implementation of some new technology, is to think about what that technology really is for what's its purpose, to identify that and then to ask the follow-up question is part of what this is for helping to support our shared humanity and our individual humanity in a healthcare context. We're going to be asking about is this to support the humanity of patients and providers or is it somehow undermining it? And I did listen to the interview you did with Tom Opolis and he kept returning to this one image that I thought it was great. You were talking about using an AI for instance, to help increase or make room for the human factor in care providing. So you could imagine the provider who's using an AI to help chart or to do something else, take away some of the other computer tasks that used to fall on providers and instead take that over so that the provider can have space to actually interact with another human being. But I was thinking there's also another direction that this could go, and that's clearly a good use of AI and a human-centered use of ai. And it's a way in which somebody who's implemented that has asked, what is this for? And has answered the question
(16:21):
In a good way. They've said, this is for helping our providers connect with patients more effectively and more like human beings. But there's another way you could go here, and I think it's good to have a counterpoint. You could imagine one way that I've heard people talk about how AI could get implemented is kind of analogously to the way that we've all seen self-checkout lanes be implemented in grocery stores where instead of having a whole bunch of grocery clerks checking you out with your grocery order, instead you have one who's just really overseeing the machines and you've robbed that interaction of any sort of personal component altogether,
(17:01):
Is that the person here has been removed from the equation and is instead just the overseer of the machine. And you could imagine that kind of implementation with new technologies, especially with AI in lots of different contexts as well, where if you've answered the question, what is the technology for in a problematic way, you're saying No, what this is really for is just for increased efficiency and increased efficiency at the detriment of taking the human being out of the equation. Then all of a sudden you've got a system in which the human being and the human element is removed, and instead the human is there just to oversee the technology. So I really do think in many ways right now, and this is coming back to our initial conversation about anxiety in the face of rising technology. So I don't think anxiety is quite the right reaction, but at the same time, I do think that we're standing on a precipice with a lot of these decisions where we really have to look at how are we going to implement this new system, this new technology, and look on the one hand at the model where we're using it in such a way that providers are able to spend more time with patients, that we're able to increase the human interaction in which we're using the technology for our own humanity and for the humanity of that of others.
(18:19):
But on the other side of things, we often have the self-checkout lane model in which we're using the technology merely for increased efficiency and in fact in ways that undermine our shared humanity and capacity to connect.
Brian Reardon (18:31):
And the self-checkout one is a good one because all of us who've encountered that, there's always that frustration when the computer doesn't work as it should, and then you have to call the person over and that dissatisfaction that occurs. So I think what you're saying is we in Catholic healthcare can't fall into that trap. We're like, well, they can just, and we see that. I mean, that's happening in hospitals and clinics where you self-check in. And again, there's some efficiencies to that. Of course. Of course. Used to be you've filled out 15 pages of paper, but you don't want to go so far that it's like, okay, I haven't seen a human being in the first 20 minutes that I've been here.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (19:07):
Exactly. And I want to be clear too, I am a fan of efficiency. I don't think there's anything wrong with pursuing efficiency. I think we just always need to ask, is the efficiency being pursued in ways that support our humanity and support the humanity of patients and providers? Or is it being a pursuit in a way, like you said, in a way that actually we've robbed the whole interaction of any kind of relationship and any kind of persons being present to each other at all.
Brian Reardon (19:30):
Yeah. Great points. I want to bring Josh in just before we say goodbye to Dr. Vukov. Anything you want to add or any thoughts, Josh?
Josh Matejka (19:37):
Well, Dr. Vukov, I think with all of this conversation about rapid change and where we're headed next, it's kind of hard to anticipate where we're going next sometimes, especially for people who are on the reactive end. How would you recommend people go about prioritizing that humanity of the people that they care for, specifically within Catholic healthcare?
Dr. Joseph Vukov (19:56):
Yeah. I think what's crucial is to explicitly and intentionally clarify mission and values. So in a Catholic context, really clarifying what does that mean generally, what does that mean specifically for us? What values are paramount? What values are not to be undermined or relegated to the background for the sake of pursuing something else? And to have that in many ways, philosophical mission-driven conversation first, because then when there's some new technology available or some new implementation that we're looking at, do we do it or how do we use this? Or how widely do we implement this, that you already have that clarity of mission and values and you can say, well, how does this fit into that vision? And if it fits in well, then you've got your answer. And if it doesn't fit in, then you've got your answer. So I think that clarifying work about mission and values and making sure everyone's on the same page and that you sort of have language to talk about these things, I really do think that's the crucial first step. And then those, again, sometimes they have to be fairly quick. Decisions down the road become a lot easier because you've got the bigger picture in front of you to fit those decisions into.
Brian Reardon (21:12):
Yeah, and as you were talking, it occurred to me that all of our members of CHA have mission and values that are very similar to each other. So for example, you could take a values of let's say, respect, integrity, stewardship, and excellence. You got to balance the respect and integrity, which is that human connection with perhaps using technology to be better stewards of resources or to improve excellence if you don't have the respect integrity in part of that equation where your value's at. So I think your advice is spot on, that we need to always be cognizant of that.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (21:47):
And I think too, it's sometimes these can seem to be at odds with each other. How can, for instance, human driven values be conversant with things like efficiency, which are crucial too. And again, I think coming back to your conversation with Tom in the previous episode is I love that image of using an AI to help take notes or to increase efficiency in other ways so that a provider can be more present personally to a patient. I think it's a great example of where you found a creative solution that actually upholds a whole bunch of values that actually don't end up being at odds with each other, but rather can compliment each other.
Brian Reardon (22:28):
Right. Well, again, that was Dr. Joseph Vukov. He's associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage and Associate Professor at Loyola University. He's the associate professor of philosophy I should mention. Joe, thanks so much for taking time and really sharing your insights and perspective. Really good conversation.
Dr. Joseph Vukov (22:47):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was great talking with you.
Brian Reardon (22:50):
And I'm your host, Brian Reardon, and this has been another episode of Health Calls, the podcast of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. As you heard, our executive producer is Josh Matejka. We also had additional support from Yvonne Stroder. This episode was engineered by Brian Hartman at Clayton Studios here in St. Louis, Missouri. You can find Health Calls on all of your favorite podcast apps and services as well as our website. You can go to chausa.org/podcast. And of course, if you've enjoyed this show, please go ahead, give us that five star rating. We do appreciate it. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, thanks for listening.
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