On the Technocratic Paradigm, Automation, and Our Human Future 

Eugene McCarraher is Associate Professor of Humanities at Villanova University, A trained historian, his work is particularly concerned with the impact of different economic and religious practices and beliefs throughout history, as explored in his two books, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (2000) and The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (2019). Professor McCarraher also serves in the more informal but profoundly significant role as “public intellectual”—a title he himself would likely unpack and deconstruct.

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Professor McCarraher is a denizen, in any case, of a particular media ecology and has much to say about religious, intellectual, moral, and economic life as it traffics in various media environments. He has written for Dissent and The Nation and contributes regularly to Commonweal, The Hedgehog Review, and Raritan. His work on The Enchantments of Mammon was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. Professor McCarraher’s latest book in preparation is tentatively titled Automated Vistas: Visions of Automation from Ancient Greece to Silicon Valley and will be published by Yale University Press.

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Professor McCarraher visited the Hank Center in the fall of 2025 to participate in a dialog with M. Tony Mills of the University of Notre Dame and a Hank Center Public Voices interview with Hank Center Director Michael P. Murphy. These videos are available at the bottom of this article. Drs. McCarraher and Murphy carried on with their conversation via email in the spring of 2026 and these conversations are bundled into the interview below. Note: "Eugene McCarraher" is abbreviated to "EM" and "Michael P. Murphy" is abbreviated to "MPM"" to indicate speaker.

 

MPM: What is the technocratic paradigm? How does it differ from simply using science and technology in the traditional way?

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EM: The "technocratic paradigm," as Pope Francis called it in Laudato Si, is a view of nature — and of human beings — as mere raw material for mastery and manipulation. It's akin to the "instrumental reason" described by Max Weber and then by the Frankfurt School Marxists, especially Max Horkheimer. The technocratic paradigm recognizes no theoretical limit on the ability to possess and transform the world, and it sees any practical limit as something to be overcome through better technology. Although I think he's kind of amorphous about this in the encyclical, Francis appears to claim that premodern forms of science and technology were more respectful of limits on knowledge and power, and that technics in particular was a more collaborative enterprise with nature, "receiving what nature itself allowed, as if by its own hand."  In Francis' view — and here he seems to be echoing Martin Heidegger — modern technology is more invasive, extractive, and therefore destructive. In my view, Francis wants us to think about and practice forms of science and technology that somehow respect the sacramentality of nature — he invokes or alludes to this in numerous places. In short, a new version of the premodern idea of nature as a theophany of the divine.

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MPM: The paradigm has a core assumption that reality is a problem to be solved by scientific and technological power—and therefore has a tendency to reduce nature and people to "raw material" to be manipulated. For his part, Pope Francis argues in Laudato si' that this paradigm produces an "undifferentiated and one-dimensional" way of thinking that engenders a "use and throw away" or "disposable" culture. How do you respond to these points/ideas?

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EM: I don't know if Francis' reference to "one-dimensional" ways of thinking is a reference to Herbert Marcuse — I'd be delighted if it were — but I think it's a point that can't be made often enough. If nature and people are simply stuff to be mastered, used, or "improved," then all "defective" versions of nature or people can be eliminated. Hence the exploitation of "resources" (as if the world is just a storehouse of power) and "workers" (human beings stripped down to their capacity to labor). I think it's evident in so many of our daily, unexamined ways of thinking about just about everything: we talk of "working families," we balk at anything that might interfere with "growth" or "innovation," we "ghost" people on our dating apps if they aren't up to snuff.  

 

MPM: The technocratic paradigm lives underneath both new media ecologies and the development of AI. Let's take media ecologies first—specifically the notion of influence. Today, the juggernaut of influence and "influencers" is its own topic, particularly when we think of the relationship between media and message and the way that many influencers—especially in Catholic land and in digital spaces—confuse personality with product. Any thoughts on that?

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EM: "Personality" has been a product since the inception of capitalism — both our own personalities and the personalities created for products and corporations by advertising and public relations — so I think that "influencer" culture is really just the neoliberal phase of the capitalist moral economy. What's different is the scale of this personality market — so many people are participating, and even religion is being "marketed" this way — and the manner in which personality is now defined in terms of social media. Philip Mirowski, an economist at Notre Dame, has written about what he calls "the entrepreneurial self":  the self as defined by clicks, likes, product recommendations, etc.Influencer culture is a perfect emblem of the technocratic paradigm because it reduces the self to what can be marketed, sold, transformed in accordance with the market, etc., in order to make a buck. Which I guess brings me to the one criticism I've always had of Francis on this score — that, speaking historically, the technocratic paradigm has been mostly a capitalist paradigm, because the utility of so much under capitalism is evaluated in terms of accumulation. I grant that state-socialist regimes were awful in terms of how they used the natural world — think of the ecological damage wrought in the Soviet Union — but it's been a primarily capitalist way of looking at the world.

 

MPM: Activity in this media landscape, again taking place largely in excarnate digital settings, has massive cultural and economic implications/consequences, especially in the ways in which exist in the world. We see new forms of social life emerging--ones that include algorithms and netbots; we see new forms of advertising—many of which operate on religious imagery and target the same kind of desire—in play. How do you think about these questions?

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EM: One of my fears about this new media landscape is that it's creating a profoundly unsocial or anti-social world in which excarnate relations increasingly define our experience. So much about these media prey on our desire for "communion" — a word that Francis unashamedly and gloriously uses in Laudato Si — and then provide a perverse fulfillment in the form of, say, the "comment" sections of online publications, where you can write the most vicious things about an author you don't like without actually having to literally face him or her. Incarnate criticism of someone can be harsh, but I think it tends to be nowhere near as ferocious as it can be when you're sitting at a computer. Why? Because you actually have to look at him or her, study reactions, assess nuances, listen to replies. 

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MPM: Now to AI. The world is becoming vastly automated and technologized in ways that seem imagined by philosophers— and authors of science fiction and speculative fiction—from 150 years ago. Developments in AI, like most anything in life, are both promising and perilous. The rise of machine preoccupied thinkers from the industrial age who sounded alarm was a most prescient development, and this has only increased in our day — even against so many supporters of unrestrained application of digital and AI technologies. What do you think about this? Are you a futurist? A Luddite? Somewhere in between? What are your reservations about AI, automation, and the rise of machine thinking (from Fordism to Silicon Valley)? What excites you about these things?

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EM: I'm writing a book about automation and the ways in which people have imagined automated futures — it's tentatively entitled Automated Vistas — so I could say, wait for the book!  

 

Actually, writers since antiquity have been imagining automation and AI — there are plenty of tales about "automatons" in Greek, Roman, and Arabic lore, medieval theologians such as Albertus Magnus were rumored to have created literal talking heads, etc.   

 

As for where I am on the spectrum about AI and automation, I guess I'm in between, closer to the Luddites, who get what I think is a bum rap. The Luddites weren't "against technology"; that's the tiresome indictment hurled at anyone who questions either the goodness or the usefulness or the "inevitability" of certain kinds of technological change. Are there good things about AI?  Sure. I have no doubt that it will reduce a lot of tedious, unnecessary manual and mental labor. Scientist friends of mine marvel at AI's ability to collect vast amounts of data and research.  

 

As for my reservations, first, I don't believe that machines "think" — I'm with my friend David Bentley Hart on this, and I recommend that everyone read his very lucid and compelling arguments on this score, either in All Things Are Full of Gods or in other publications. Second, I follow the great historian of technology Lewis Mumford in contending that people started to think of themselves as machines before they started to think of their tools and everything else as machines. One of the real dangers I see with AI is that we're starting to become machinic — we reduce ourselves and our very minds to computational, statistical devices. (There's the technocratic paradigm again!) I'm also concerned that when we offload so much of our cognition to AI — the claims for which are, in my humble opinion, incredibly and often cynically overblown — we make ourselves stupid.  

 

My biggest concern is that we're just accepting the political and cultural hegemony of Silicon Valley, and handing over our future to be a vanity project for the techno-oligarchy. I get really annoyed when people talk about how AI and other technologies are "inevitable." When you talk or think like that, you're effectively handing over your political agency to Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel. (The latter is an especially unpleasant, misanthropic overlord.) We need to return control over technology to workers, which means, yes, some form of socialism. I want workers to control the design and deployment of technology in their workplaces.  

 

MPM: How might a theologically informed imagination, ethic, and anthropology in a Catholic key help respond to these "new things"-- digital media ecologies, the emergence of AI (in all of its forms—agentic and as a force in labor), and automation in general?

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Remember that I'm a historian by training and a "theologian" by avocation, but my sense is that theologians haven't devoted a lot of extensive thought to AI or to technology in general.  (I'm not a fan of Jacques Ellul, who I think tended to view technology as some kind of force unto itself.)  John Milbank has written some incisive stuff about technology, and Tara Isabella Burton (who has a doctorate in theology from Oxford) is writing what sounds like a fascinating book on magic, technology, and modernity.  So what I'm going to say here is kind of riffing.

 

A Catholic theological imagination of technology should start from the fact that we're the image and likeness of God, and that our technological creativity is a participation in God's creative power. All technology — including automation and AI — partakes of that in some way, either well or perversely. The fact that we're the Imago Dei means that we want to be like God, and that's a good thing. Wanting to be godlike — which is what we're doing when we're trying to alter nature to fulfill our desires — is part of our nature. (The Orthodox make theosis, or divinization, a more central part of their theology than Catholics do.  I think Catholics should follow suit.) Therefore, if you want to be godlike, everything then depends on what you think God is like. It's a long story that I'm going to relate in the first chapter of Automated Vistas, but so much of our modern conception of divinity is "voluntarist" — it emphasizes power, will, and agency. If you think God is fundamentally about power, then you'll end up with transhumanism: disgust for our fleshly existence, impatience with flaws and imperfections, and a longing to transcend this lovely corporeal realm for — "the cloud," mechanical prostheses, immortality with Peter Thiel. I don't want that (especially the latter). I think that any attempt to achieve godlike status on that basis will inevitably make us inhuman, not transhuman. But if you think of God as love, then I think we'll end up with very different approaches to and forms of technology. What will they look like? I have no idea. Will they include automation and AI? Perhaps, in some forms. I'm all for better work, and less of it. But I think that that will be achieved primarily, not through automation, but through religious and social movements that repudiate the "Protestant ethic" and insist on very different ways of thinking about work and character. They would reject the technocratic paradigm and replace it with a sacramental cosmology which, like that of premodern Christians, envisions the world as a theophany.