Pope Leo’s Unsettling Vision of the AI Future

The Vatican, as one aphorism puts it, tends to “think in centuries.” But Pope Leo XIV seems intent on changing that, moving with remarkable speed to publish his first encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Leo has managed to produce a major teaching document on AI while college students are still booing commencement speeches about how the technology will change the world. Compare that with his 19th-century namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who didn’t publish an encyclical about the Industrial Revolution until more than a century after it started.In Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), Leo seeks to counterbalance alarm with hope. He composes a long and vivid list of dangers posed by AI, but insists that the technology is a “gift that can alleviate suffering and open up new possibilities”—as long as it’s ordered by humane values rather than monopolistic interests. As for the specific advantages that AI might yield, however, Leo is largely silent. His expressions of alarm are detailed and expansive; his expressions of hope, perfunctory and brief.Leo decries AI-driven unemployment, especially among young people, as well as the environmental degradation caused by energy-intensive, carbon-emitting AI infrastructure. He condemns the exploitation of workers such as those who label data, moderate disturbing content, or extract “the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends.”[Read: Why Silicon Valley is turning to the Catholic Church]The encyclical also takes a hard line against autonomous-weapons systems. “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person,” Leo writes. “Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.”On many of these issues, Leo offers prescriptions for reform that rely heavily o