The Pope Is Now the World’s Most Famous Humanist

Does the pope have an editor? If I could presume to take on this role for a second, then I might have one little note for Leo XIV after reading his new encyclical about artificial intelligence: Great stuff, but lose the Tower of Babel. It’s a tired cliché. Most of us have already been told that those who would seek to be like God will see their ambitions crash to the ground. And in this instance, the lesson has a limited audience. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the tower builders should have an image of the tower tattooed on their chest. But the rest of us, who mostly suffer the fallout from those godlike men and their aspirations, are just trying to get through our days.Fortunately, Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (or “Magnificent Humanity”), is much more than a slap at Silicon Valley. The pope does two very useful things in his screed: He identifies the threat of AI as a form of dehumanization, and then he asserts, with passion and clear eyes, what is actually worth saving about being human. This second part of the argument is often left vague—or left out—when people talk about the threat of AI. Many people feel uncomfortable with a technology that seems to be squeezing some essential-feeling elements, like thinking, out of our lives, but then don’t spend a lot of time trying to articulate what is being lost.The ideology of Silicon Valley is one of inevitability: History is moving, with Hegelian determinism, in one direction—toward superintelligent machines—and anyone who questions or worries about what this means is made to feel like they are waving their hands in the path of a freight train. I’ve had so many conversations with proselytizers that end with, Well, it’s coming, so you better get used to it. What Leo does is push back against the inevitability.He chose to release his encyclical on the anniversary of a previous Pope Leo’s treatise, in 1891, which looked at the ways industrialization was flattening human beings. The current pope clearly w