On the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

As I revisit the conclusion of my 2010 doctoral dissertation on Charles Taylor, originally written under the title Charles Taylor and Modern Identity, I realize that many of the problems that structured that work now reappear in the contemporary debate on artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is not only a new technology. Nor is it merely an ambivalent tool, capable of emancipatory or destructive uses depending on the political conditions in which it is embedded. It is also a new figure within a long history through which life, speech, the body, and suffering are translated into administrable categories. What appeared in Taylor as the problem of modern identity, and in the work of the theologian Ivan Illich as the institutional corruption of Christianity, reappears today in the form of an algorithmic bureaucracy capable of reorganizing the very field in which something can appear as visible, useful, communicable, governable, or recognizable.

The question that serves as the guiding thread is not new. It appears in the Gospel of Luke, when a lawyer asks Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” The question seeks to establish a kind of delimitation or boundary. The lawyer wants to know how far moral obligation extends. He wants to know who belongs within the circle of responsibility and who remains outside it. Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan: a man falls wounded on the road. A priest and a Levite pass by him, but they continue their way, indifferent to the man’s suffering. A Samaritan, however, stops, approaches him, bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn, and cares for him.

The usual reading of the parable emphasizes universalism. The neighbor would not be only the member of my group, my people, my religion, or my community. The neighbor would be every human being in need. The lesson seems simple: we must help the other without discriminating according to belonging. Yet although this interpretation is not false, Illich tells us that something decisive is lost if it exhausts the meaning of the parable. In this sense, the parable does not seek simply to establish a universal moral rule. It does not tell us that we must apply a general obligation to all human beings. It points to something else: that the neighbor “happens” within a concrete relationship that exceeds every generality.

The neighbor is not a prior category. It is not a class of individuals. It is not an abstract unit of humanity. It is the one who appears wounded on the road and whose presence interrupts the world I inhabited. The Samaritan does not respond to a moral form. He does not act because he has correctly identified a case within a universal category. He responds to a bodily presence. He stops because someone is there. The relationship is born of a contingency. It cannot be fully deduced from a norm.

This is the force of Illich’s reading. The parable does not speak of assistance, but of a form of relation. Christianity, in its most radical core, would not simply have introduced a broader morality, but a new possibility of bonding between concrete persons. That relation is not based on prior belonging. Nor is it based on contractual reciprocity or the administration of our most basic needs. It is born of a freedom defined as response before the presence of the other.

But precisely because the possibility of embodied response is fragile, contingent, perhaps “miraculous,” the temptation arises to secure it. We want to guarantee that no one is left abandoned on the road. We want to organize mercy. We want to transform the living response into a stable, predictable structure. Norms, institutions, procedures, obligations, systems of assistance, and codes of conduct then emerge. All of this is undoubtedly necessary. It is not a matter of denying the importance of law, hospitals, social protection, or public institutions. The problem begins when mediation forgets its mediating character and replaces the living relation. “Sentient intelligence,” Zubiri would say, becomes a kind of artificial intelligence.

Then the other ceases to appear as neighbor and begins to appear as case. The sick person becomes a patient; the poor person, a beneficiary; the migrant, a flow; the student, a file; the citizen, a procedure; the victim, data. Speech is translated into a form, and suffering is turned into an indicator. This does not mean denying that the institution can help, care, or recognize. The problem is that this same capacity for assistance is traversed by a logic of classification and administration that can neutralize what it seeks to address. The institution receives the other, but it receives the other according to its own codes; it names the other, but in doing so places the other within a prior grid of intelligibility; it protects the other, but it can also reduce the other to a functional category. In this way, the exteriority of the other runs the risk of being absorbed by the system that organizes, translates, and makes it manageable.

Illich interpreted this transformation as the “corruption of Christianity.” Not because modernity has simply abandoned the evangelical message, but because it has preserved it in a disfigured form. Western modernity is not only dechristianization. It is also institutionalized, bureaucratized Christianity, Christianity converted into a system. Concern for the other does not disappear. On the contrary, it becomes universalized. But it becomes universalized by losing the concrete other: the neighbor is transformed into a category.

Here it becomes necessary to return to Taylor. In A Secular Age, Taylor questions the narratives according to which modernity would simply be the result of the loss of religious beliefs. Secularization does not consist only in the fact that people have stopped believing in God. It consists in a transformation of the conditions of belief. The modern world does not merely deny transcendence. It learns to experience itself as closed within its own immanence. Belief becomes one option among others. Nonbelief appears as maturity. Faith falls under suspicion as consolation or evasion.

The so-called “death of God” is not the result of a scientific discovery. Modern science does not discover the nonexistence of God; rather, it transforms our image of the cosmos. What is constituted is a new moral horizon and a new cosmological and social imaginary. Now the world and life can be understood without reference to any transcendence; the real is reduced to what is explainable, calculable, administrable, and available. Naturalistic humanism closes off every reference to anything that might exceed it.

Now, Taylor does not offer us an antimodern critique. He recognizes that modernity has realized certain Christian impulses: the dignity of the person, human rights, the critique of religious coercion, attention to concrete suffering, and the universalization of moral concern. But he also shows its ambiguity. Modernity can partially realize Christianity and, at the same time, close off what in Christianity referred to a deeper transformation of life. It can preserve care and lose transcendence. It can affirm dignity while reducing it to the logic of the administration of what is given. It can defend the human being, but at the price of turning him or her into an object of the system.

Artificial intelligence must be thought within this history. It does not appear in an innocent world. It does not introduce from the outside a logic completely alien to the human. It is inserted into a world already organized by bureaucracies, archives, institutions, diagnoses, evaluations, protocols, and forms of classification. AI does not invent the reduction of the other to data. It inherits it, accelerates it, automates it, and makes it more opaque and more efficient.

Where bureaucracy had reduced life to a file, artificial intelligence introduces prediction. Where administration had replaced testimony with classification, AI introduces correlation. Where the institution had subordinated the face of the victim to the archive, AI introduces risk profiles, automated decisions, and anticipatory forms of governance. Its danger does not consist only in machines deciding for us. It consists in perfecting a form of world in which the other appears only once it has already been translated into processable information.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the question of the neighbor becomes a question about the conditions under which the other appears. It is not enough to establish ethical principles for the correct use of a technology. We must examine how that technology participates in the production of profiles, patterns, anomalies, users, threats, preferences, performances, or probabilities. The risk is not only injustice in treatment, but a prior form of reduction: that suffering may no longer be able to interpellate because it has already been registered as an incident.

The problem is not solved by appealing simply to the body, presence, or direct experience. In “The Tantric Distinction,” I tried to formulate this difficulty. Faced with the advance of algorithmic abstraction, it is understandable that we would want to vindicate the body. For a long time, modernity thought of the subject as a separate, abstract, representational mind. The turn toward the body made it possible to question that figure. To know is not to represent from a disembodied mind. It is to act, perceive, speak, move, feel, and participate from a situated corporeality.

But the ordinary body is not a reserve of authenticity. It is not outside history. It is not free of conceptuality. It is not a pure instance opposed to abstraction. This ordinary body desires, fears, rejects, recognizes, classifies, defends itself, and identifies. It spontaneously distinguishes the familiar from the strange, the desirable from the threatening, what is one’s own from what is alien, the visible from the irrelevant. It does not merely receive a world. It opens a world. And that world does not appear from an original neutrality, but from habits, fears, desires, identifications, and sedimented forms of perception.

This means that closure is not only in the machine or in the institution. It is also in the ordinary body when it takes its own field of appearance as the measure of the real. A body may have learned which bodies matter and which do not. It may feel threat before formulating a judgment. It may experience rejection before justifying it. It may render the other invisible before explicitly denying the other’s dignity. When a historical configuration becomes corporeality, it ceases to present itself as a construction and begins to appear as immediate evidence.

Artificial intelligence intensifies this double closure. It inherits the bureaucratic logic of classification and, at the same time, feeds on already conditioned bodily worlds: desires, fears, habits of consumption, patterns of attention, prejudices, reactions, and preferences. It does not simply replace the human with the artificial. It formalizes, automates, and scales operations that were already present in our institutions and in our sensibilities. For this reason, the opposition between artificial intelligence and humanity is insufficient. The human is not innocent. Ordinary life is traversed by prior forms of arbitrariness.

The question of the neighbor therefore forces us to think beyond the usual oppositions: religion and secularity, body and machine, humanity and artificial intelligence, experience and abstraction. These oppositions name real tensions, but they do not reach the center of the problem. What is decisive is the way in which the field of recognition of the other is constituted. What is at stake there is whether a presence comes to interpellate us or is reduced to function, category, or information.

The exteriority of the other does not mean that the other is outside all relation. It means that the other is not exhausted by the place he or she occupies in my world. The other can appear within my field of experience, within my institutions, within my categories, within my technical systems. But the other does not belong to them as property, function, or extension. The other’s exteriority consists in exceeding the meaning my world assigns to him or her.

The parable of the Good Samaritan retains all its power here. The wounded man on the road is not available data. He is, rather, a radical interruption. The Samaritan does not know in advance that the encounter will occur. It is not the product of modeling or calculation. He simply encounters the wounded man at the side of the road. The encounter results in an obligation to respond. This contingency is essential. In a world completely organized to eliminate contingency, it is impossible to recognize what only happens as a “call.”

This is not about idealizing spontaneity or rejecting every institution. We need norms, rights, hospitals, schools, procedures, techniques, and mediations. Without them, many lives would be even more exposed than they already are. But no mediation should be confused with the relation itself. No institution by itself exhausts justice or replaces mercy.

Seen from this point of view, the death of God is not only the disappearance of a theological belief. It is the closure of a form of experience in which the other could appear as an irreducible, infinite, irrevocable call. God dies when transcendence becomes unthinkable, when the neighbor becomes a category. God dies when suffering is transformed into a file; when the sensitivity of the agent becomes the ultimate evidence of the other’s reality; when the ordinary body confuses its world with reality and the machine formalizes, accelerates, and automates a closure that was already within us.

Artificial intelligence brings this history to a new threshold. Its most disturbing question is not whether it will come to think like us. Nor is it whether it will replace certain human tasks. Those questions are relevant up to a point, but they can distract us from what truly matters. The central question is what happens to that which cannot be translated without loss into processable information. What happens to the voice that does not enter the model? To the suffering that produces no signal? To the body that does not fit the pattern? To the demand that does not become legible? To the neighbor who does not appear as neighbor because the world has already classified him or her otherwise?

In returning to Taylor, I am not simply returning to my first dissertation. Rather, I recognize a line that runs through my later work. In my study of the Canadian philosopher and his interlocutors, I find a variation of the question to which my Buddhist teachers first exposed me during my long residence in Asia, and which has remained alive throughout my European and Latin American itinerary. That question could be formulated as follows: how to think an identity that is not founded on self-closure; how to imagine a modernity that does not close itself off from transcendence; how to sustain institutions that do not seek to replace love, mercy, compassion, or care; how to inhabit a technology that does not reduce life to data replicable by a machine; how to understand the body without confusing its ordinary world with reality itself.

The question “Who is my neighbor?” has not lost an ounce of its relevance. On the contrary, it has become imperative. It is no longer enough to broaden the moral circle of belonging. Nor is it enough to affirm that every human being must be recognized in his or her dignity. It is necessary to ask about the historical, institutional, bodily, and technical conditions under which someone can appear as someone. Because the other may stand before us and yet end up being invisible.

In this sense, from the beginning, the problem I have tried to answer is the question of the neighbor. Whether it is possible to establish a nontotalized relation with the other, a relation in which the other does not appear only as a mirror of my world, a function of my system, an object of my sensitivity, or data for this “biological machine” to which I am at times reduced. A relation in which, amid secular, bureaucratic, bodily, and algorithmic closure, the call may still be heard as an interruption of my world.

Bibliography

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