At the 69th Annual Conference of the European Federation of Christian Teachers, held in Naples from July 14 to 18, Fr. Gaël Giraud SJ was one of the keynote speakers. Since the theme of the gathering was ecological transition, he presented an analysis of possible future climate scenarios based on scientific data, pointing out that rising global temperatures lead to mass migrations and profound social transformations — raising urgent issues of social justice.
He also emphasized that the worst scenarios can still be avoided through a just economic transition toward sustainable energy production. Beyond rethinking the economy from the perspective of the commons, Fr. Giraud also addressed the current debate on so-called “AI,” identifying a number of ethical issues it raises.
As a man with a rich and dynamic personal history and deep expertise in mathematical economics, he also shared the inspiration that led him to become a Jesuit.
I think there were two main turning points. The first was my experience in Africa. I was sent to Chad, south of Libya, to teach at a Jesuit high school. I taught mathematics and physics. I had just completed my PhD in mathematics and was supposed to perform my military service in France. I asked instead to do civil service, and so I was sent to Chad.
In my free time I spent many hours with the street children — there were a great many of them in the city. Eventually we built a center for them, twenty years ago, which still exists today. It can host forty children, and over the past two decades more than 500 have passed through its doors.
With them I had a real experience of the Gospel. They were completely destitute — they literally had nothing — and yet there was such profound joy in their lives. They helped me to experience the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor.” It was no longer something abstract for me; when I think of it, I think of those children. I wanted to hold on to the source of joy they had taught me. When I returned from Chad, I wanted to become a Jesuit, to live among the very poor and continue to learn the joy of the Gospel from them.
I was raised Catholic and received a traditional education, even though my parents — like many French intellectuals — maintained a critical distance from the Church. Nevertheless, they wanted my brother and me to have a classical Christian formation: I went to catechism, I was an altar boy, and so on.
When I was ten, I loved the music of Bach and asked myself what kind of work I might do in order to listen to Bach every day. I was told I should become either an organist or a priest! That idea disappeared during my adolescence, but when I turned twenty it returned.
Another aspect was that Jesuits are missionaries — they are meant to go to the frontiers. I was very attracted by that.
What you are describing is called deep ecology. This is definitely not Christian. Some of its proponents even claim that humanity should disappear in order to stop destroying the planet. That is certainly not Christian.
The Christian tradition, instead, affirms that the human being is indeed at the center — as the Book of Genesis says — but not at the center to triumph or to rule violently. Humanity is placed at the center to serve creation.
I believe the question really comes down to how we interpret Genesis 1:28, where God speaks to Adam and Eve and says: “Be fruitful and multiply, and have dominion over the Earth.” But nowhere does it say they may destroy it.
Since the 1960s many have accused Christians of being responsible for ecological disaster because of this verse. But Jews read the same Scriptures, and Muslims also acknowledge the importance of Genesis. It is not just about Christians. In Laudato si’, Pope Francis explicitly addresses this interpretation of Genesis and explains that the idea of domination as destruction is a misinterpretation.
In my own doctoral research in theology, I tried to understand what it means to have “dominion” over the planet. My answer is found at the other end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation. In Rev 3:20–21 God says: “I knock at the door of your heart; if you recognize my voice and open, we will have dinner together, as a friend with a friend.” Then God adds: those who triumph in the great challenge of holiness will sit on the throne of the Father together with the Lamb.
In other words, God the Father wants to share His power with us. Power is a common good; God wants us to sit with Christ on the throne. In the parable of the talents, when the master returns, he asks his servants what they have done with the money he entrusted to them. When one replies, “I have multiplied it tenfold,” the master says: “Good servant, I will give you authority over my cities.” Again, power is shared.
So, if we want to interpret Genesis 1:28 correctly, we must understand dominion as shared power. Humanity is placed at the center of creation not to dominate and destroy, but to serve and help creation flourish. We are called to share our power with the birds, the mice, the flowers… not to annihilate them.
That vision takes us very far from deep ecology.
That is indeed why some people do not want to have children. I would say that your generation faces a huge challenge that no previous generation has had: you belong to history because you must save the planet from the destruction we are causing now.
If you eliminate yourself, who will save us? Ten years ago, when I spoke like this, I saw stars in the eyes of young people. They thought: “I have a great mission in life!” And up until two years ago this was still true.
But recently I have seen a new, even worse tendency. Some young people have grown weary of ecological issues. They were raised with constant warnings about climate change, and it has created so much anxiety that they cannot cope. Their reaction is simply to ignore the problem.
This happens especially because they see that our generation is not acting, or is doing very little. We put them in a kind of schizophrenia: we tell them we must act, yet the vast majority of adults are not acting.
I honestly do not know how to respond to this new tendency. It is very difficult.
From my experience, as long as we are speaking about global warming, most industry leaders now understand that it is in their own interest to shift. Business is going green. I would not have said that ten years ago, but my impression today is that it is happening.
With one major exception: the banks. They face a serious problem. Banks hold large amounts of fossil-fuel-related financial assets, because they have financed massive investments in coal, oil, and gas. If we decide to stop burning fossil fuels, the value of these assets will collapse to zero. That would bankrupt the banks — and they know it. The ecological transition is therefore seen as their enemy.
How can we address this? One option would be to do what we did in 2009 with “toxic assets”: create public “bad banks” that would purchase these stranded assets and hold them. The private banks would receive money, and if the assets’ value fell to zero, the public bank would bear the loss.
The problem is that when public banks incur losses, these become public debt — ultimately paid by citizens. That is not a fair solution.
There is a much better option: the European Central Bank (ECB) could play the role of the bad bank. Unlike private banks, a central bank can absorb such losses, because it can recapitalize itself simply by creating money.
When I proposed this in France a few years ago, I was harshly criticized by some economists. But later, fortunately, the Bank for International Settlements — which supervises central banks worldwide — published a paper confirming that this approach was valid.
Of course, the challenge is one of confidence in the euro. But here is my answer: if we save the private banks in this way, then in return they can be required to finance a Green New Deal — the ecological transition in Europe. This would create a large number of green jobs, stimulate growth, and restore public trust in the euro.
I am not in favor of degrowth as a project. If you claim that degrowth is the way forward, you must explain what will happen with unemployment.
I would say that the ecological transition can actually create a vast number of jobs. If we use less oil, coal, and gas, we will need many more people to work in renewable energy, in energy efficiency, and in sustainable agriculture.
For example, if we shift to organic farming in Europe, we will need roughly one million additional workers in agriculture. The ecological transition is therefore a great source of employment — and that means economic growth, measured by GDP.
On the one hand, we clearly need to reduce our material consumption — which points in the direction of degrowth. But on the other hand, the transition will generate new jobs, which implies growth.
The point is that we will create more jobs while consuming less. That is not degrowth, but a different kind of growth.
There is nothing truly intelligent about AI. The term is a misleading metaphor for what is, in reality, a network of switches. What we call a “neuron” in these systems is simply a series of switches. When you add more layers of switches, you get what is called deep learning. It begins to resemble intelligence, but it has nothing to do with genuine understanding — it is merely a very fast way of computing.
AI systems compute much more rapidly than human beings, which creates the appearance of intelligence. But in truth, it is just a machine trained on millions of examples, producing answers that look intelligent.
There are two major problems that reveal just how unintelligent it is. The first is the problem of hallucinations. If you ask ChatGPT a serious question — say, about a paper supposedly written in the 1970s by a famous Hungarian economist on the link between wage growth and unemployment — it might produce a complete fabrication: an author who never existed, an article published in a journal that never existed. This is called a hallucination. Someone truly intelligent would never do that. The machine is not “lying” — it simply cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is programmed to provide an answer, so it produces something that looks plausible, even when it is invented.
If you ask a simple question, for which there is one obvious correct answer, it will usually respond correctly. But as soon as you ask something more complex, it cannot differentiate between fact and invention.
There are also very basic things you cannot discuss with a machine, because it does not see as we see. For instance, it cannot truly interpret a graph.
Exactly. For more details, see my book co-written with the French philosopher, Anne Alombert : Le Capital que je ne suis pas [The Capital that I am Not], Fayard, 2024.
This is an epistemological problem. But it is also an ethical problem.
There are many, and Pope Francis has mentioned several.
Medicine: there is a temptation to say, “We no longer need doctors, AI can replace them.” But when I am sick and I speak with a doctor, that human interaction is part of the therapy. Knowing that another human being understands my suffering and is trying to help me is essential. Illness is not just a mathematical problem — it is a human reality. For example, cancer patients often explain that their relationship with their oncologist is crucial. If they trust their doctor, their chances of recovery are higher. This relational dimension of therapy can never be provided by a machine.
Justice: in many courts in the United States, AI software is already being used, trained on millions of past cases. Judges are asked to consider what the algorithm recommends “on average.” Today, when a judge decides differently from what the machine suggests, people often protest: “The machine knows better than you!” That is dangerous, because American jurisprudence is deeply biased by racism, sexism, and social segregation. If AI is used to decide justice, it will reproduce those biases.
Lethal weapons: this is perhaps the most alarming. Pope Francis has spoken strongly against it: machines should never be allowed to decide whether a person lives or dies. Yet autonomous lethal weapons exist today — drones guided by AI that can kill. That is insane. A machine can make a mistake and kill an innocent person. But who is then responsible? A machine has no ethical responsibility. In this context, traditional notions such as “lawful war” or “war crimes” become meaningless. This calls into question the law of war as such and, through it, international law itself.
Of course. All chatbots are biased, because they are trained on a particular category of data, and that data has been filtered by human beings. In Kenya, for example, poorly paid workers spend entire days sorting training data for AI, removing antisemitic, racist, or pornographic content. That is fine as far as it goes, but it also introduces other biases — such as the one you mention.
Chatbots are inevitably politically oriented. How could they not be? They are made by human beings.
There is an additional problem: what I call the “code disease.” New chatbots “swallow” everything on the internet and then “digest” it. To build bigger models you need more data, but current generative AI machines have already exhausted most of the human-generated data available online. Some engineers in California therefore began training new chatbots with artificial data, created by earlier AI models rather than by humans.
This means we now have a second generation of AI trained on the output of the first. There is no reason this could not continue. But people have noticed that, by the sixth generation, the results become nonsensical. An experiment was conducted where a machine was given an alphabet and asked to reproduce it after several training cycles on AI-generated data. By the sixth generation, all the letters were identical. The alphabet itself had been lost.
This is not a hallucination — it is a structural problem: too much regularity in the synthetic data makes the machine “stupid,” not like a human being, but as a machine.
That is why there is an upper limit to the size and generations of these models. Beyond a certain point, they collapse into incoherence. It also means we now face a gigantic problem with the internet itself: we can no longer be sure whether online content was written by a human being or by an AI. And we don’t know which “generation” it belongs to. In other words: “machines eat machines, and become stupid.” And this might jeopardize the reliability of all data available on the internet. It is not impossible that, in a few decades, some countries will decide to ban this use of AI, just as in Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune, where “thinking machines” are banned and replaced by humans (“mentats”) who, while they can make mistakes, do not suffer from the epistemological and ethical problems generated by machines.
I don’t think so. I believe the ecological transition should move in the opposite direction. It should teach us how to produce energy locally, even in our own backyards, with a wind turbine or similar means. If you can produce your own energy, you gain political power as well. Autonomy in energy goes hand in hand with autonomy in governance.
Quite the contrary: I would say that ecological transition is a way to recover singularity and empowerment. When you build a small, local energy community, you recreate the spirit of the village. That is the principle of the commons — one of the most important antidotes to uniformity.
Uniformity, I believe, comes from two sources. First, the industrial revolution, which standardized culture, languages, and ideas. Second, social media, which “tribalizes” our experience, locking us into bubbles where we only meet people who think like us. There is no way to change our minds in such an environment.
We clearly need some regulation of social media. And we need the ecological transition to promote the commons, which can help us recover singularity. Agriculture and recycling must be adapted to the places where we live. They cannot be identical everywhere. Each place is unique and must find its own path.
Until recently, economists generally thought of goods as being either private or public. Private goods are managed by the market, while public goods are managed by the state. A private good is one whose consumption is rivalrous and whose access must therefore be regulated. A public good is non-rivalrous and does not require strict regulation.
But there are also hybrid goods — neither fully private nor fully public. These are the commons. Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in economics (2009), studied them extensively and identified eight rules by which communities successfully manage such resources.
Take, for example, a pond in Guinea. Local farmers rely on fish from the pond for protein, and over generations they have developed complex rules for fishing. No one privately owns the pond, but everyone collectively cares for it. They have agreed upon rules that determine how and when fishing can take place. The pond is therefore a common good: access is shared, and the community itself regulates its use.
According to Ostrom’s work, successful commons management requires several elements: a clear boundary of the resource, a clear definition of who may access it, democratic deliberation on the rules, and low-cost mechanisms to resolve disputes accessible to all.
I believe so. For instance, consider DNDi (Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative), a platform that addresses diseases completely neglected by the private sector. By developing new therapies at low cost — such as treatments for hepatitis C in Malaysia and Egypt — DNDi brings together the state, the private sector, big pharma, and civil society. The state finances part of the effort, pharmaceutical companies conduct the experiments, and NGOs distribute the therapies.
This arrangement has been very successful. The pharmaceutical companies can still use the experiments to develop new findings for business purposes, but the therapies are made available as commons. It is a model of cooperation that works even on a global scale.
