Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects.
Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”
Among other things, Leo called for:
government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
education to help students think critically about the technology
action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.
I have to make an effort to read this encyclical. I see a technology being forced on all of us. Even if its output and capabilities are overhyped, its worth to the insane capitalist overlords cannot be overestimated. If they were willing to replace your online native English speaking service representative with a hard-to-understand person from India, they will be happy to use an AI, whether it works well or not. The misuses of AI are myriad and enough to make Orwell spin in his grave at 3,000 RPM. The Amish make decisions on how far technology will penetrate their culture. I fully believe that this technology has a limited lifetime due to energy (thermodynamic) considerations and will disappear eventually like mass personal transportation. But it has the capability to do much societal harm in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteI am reading that a lot of towns don't want the big AI plants because they don't provide enough jobs to make up for the way they hog water and energy. Plus, people view them with a bit of suspicion. Which seems warranted.
DeleteI think you are right that AI has limits. It may not disappear altogether, but can't live up to all the hype.
AI puts me in mind of Psalm115:5-8:
Delete"They have mouths but cannot speak, and eyes that cannot see...they have hands but cannot feel, and feet that cannot walk...And those who make idols are like them, as are all who trust in them."
I plan on reading the encyclical. 42,300 words translates to 168 pages, double spaced. Which isn't that much for a novel, but a lot for a work of theology, so I'll be reading it in chapters (I guess there are five?).
ReplyDeleteI'm sure AI could come up with a "Cliff Notes" version, but that defeats the purpose!
I liked it that Leo decided to attend the meeting and give a short introduction that helps overcome the intimidation of reading a large document.
ReplyDeleteHe gave that introduction in English which not only helped to reach a wider audience but also unlike Italian can be read in a manner that makes it less susceptible to false emphasis.
"Like the earlier 'Leo', I feel entrusted to look upon another huge transformation with eyes of faith, with lucidity of reason, with openness to mystery, and with cries of the poor and the earth resounding in my heart."
What a wonderful way to approach any topic! I particularly liked the 'openness to mystery' which conveys the humility with which we should approach life.
I liked the analogy of comparing AI to nuclear disarmament. We have a lot of challenging problems: nuclear weapons, climate change, migration, etc. Betty and I listened to a British Abbot talk about the Benedictine approach to life. One of the points he made is that we have to stop making things into crises that make them unapproachable.
I liked the analogy of a construction site, perhaps because I had employed it when I worked in the mental health system. I compared the mental health system to a construction site of an office tower in which the clients and clinicians on the bottom floors had to wear hard hats to protect themselves from the constant remodeling on the floors above. People really remembered that image.
I liked the image of building a civilization of love rather than of intelligence. Barron and others have focused too much on ideas. If we are not focusing on ideas we are usually focusing on resources in the form of money.
When a consumer was asked what he desired in a mental health system he answered: "Not the most expensive one, or one with all the latest best practices but one that I have helped to shape and know will be there when I need it." Isn't that what we want from our schools, our parishes, our government, our computer systems.
Links to a video of the speech, its text and an outline of the Encyclical are on my WEAL website
Deletehttps://lakeohioweal.blogspot.com/2026/05/pope-leo-xiv-ai-encyclical-speech.html
Leo is making a valiant effort, but I suspect it will have little to no impact. The genie is out of the bottle. Perhaps someone should ask Al to suggest policies to mitigate the harmful impacts of AI. And policies to harness the positives of AI.
ReplyDeleteI asked Gemini AI about Leo’s concerns.
ReplyDelete“ In his landmark first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), Pope Leo XIV addressed artificial intelligence as one of the defining moral and structural challenges of our era. Rather than rejecting progress, he framed the path forward as a deliberate effort to "disarm" AI—meaning society must strip the technology of the economic, political, and military frameworks that turn it into an instrument of domination, inequality, and death.
The Pope, drawing from scientists, engineers, and ethicists, outlined specific, actionable strategies across different sectors of society to prevent these negative impacts.
1. Concrete Policy and Institutional Action
Pope Leo emphasized that abstract ethical principles are entirely insufficient on their own. Preventing harm requires concrete, structural enforcement:
Robust Legal Frameworks & Independent Oversight: Governments must not abdicate their responsibilities to the market. The Vatican calls for enforceable laws and independent, public regulatory bodies to oversee AI development rather than relying on corporate self-governing frameworks.
Treating Data as a Public Good: To combat the intense concentration of power and wealth in Big Tech, the encyclical argues that data ownership cannot be left solely in private hands. Data must be regulated similarly to public utilities to ensure it serves the common good.
A Slower Pace of Adoption: The Pope pushed back against tech executives who resist regulation, arguing that "calling for prudence... and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI" is a healthy exercise of responsible care for humanity, not an opposition to progress.
2. Preventing "Automated Death" in Warfare
One of the most urgent and politically charged sections of the encyclical addresses AI in remote and autonomous warfare. The Pope declared the traditional "just war" theory outdated given modern technology, demanding strict preventative boundaries:
A Ban on Automated Lethal Decisions: It is "not permissible" to entrust life-and-death or otherwise irreversible battlefield decisions to algorithms.
Verifiable Chains of Command: Every AI system used in military settings must guarantee absolute transparency. The decision-making process must be entirely traceable so that accountability and blame can never be collapsed into "the machine."
3. Protecting Labor and the Global Economy
Pope Leo warned that AI risks creating a "culture of power" that prioritizes the idolatry of profit over human dignity, explicitly outlining how to safeguard workers:
Subordinating AI to Human Dignity: Tech companies and policymakers must design systems that support the worker rather than forcing the individual to adapt to the relentless speed and demands of the machine.
Halting Job Sacrifice for Profit: The encyclical explicitly states that the pursuit of higher profit margins cannot justify choices that systematically wipe out livelihoods.
Eliminating Digital Exploitation: The Pope shone a light on the "invisible labor" underpinning AI—specifically calling out the low-wage exploitation of data labelers and the dangerous child labor used in the Global South to mine the rare earth minerals powering data centers. Preventing AI harm means regulating the entire supply chain.
4. Preserving Human Relationships and Critical Thought
At an individual and social level, the encyclical warns against the erosion of truth and human connection, offering cultural solutions:
Prioritizing Truth Over Pragmatism: To prevent AI-generated disinformation from destabilizing democracies, the Pope urges deep educational investment in critical thinking, particularly for the young, ensuring that "what is useful" does not substitute for what is true.
Resisting "Simulated Care": Users must be cautious not to substitute AI chatbot interactions for genuine human relationships, warning that relying on artificial empathy can weaken personal creativity, judgment, and authentic community bonds.”
Unfortunately it relies on the good will and voluntary cooperation of corporations, government, and other large organizations in multiple sectors. Since greed is now the defining characteristic in most advanced countries these days, it’s unlikely that these suggestions will be adopted. Next I’m going to ask it how human society can successfully adapt to an AI driven society.
DeleteSo I asked Gemini “ If these policies are not adopted voluntarily by governments and corporations, how can the people prepare and successfully adapt to the tumultuous changes that will come.”
DeleteResponse— If governments and corporations fail to act—leaving the global AI race to be driven purely by corporate profit and geopolitical power—the burden of navigating this transition falls directly onto individuals, families, and local communities.
In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV actually anticipates this possibility. His framework suggests that when structural, top-down protections fail, human beings must adapt by building resilience from the bottom up.
Adapting to a chaotic, AI-driven future requires practical, grounded strategies for individuals and communities to protect their livelihoods, their relationships, and their humanity.
1. Professional Adaptation: Developing "AI-Resistant" Human Skills
If corporations prioritize mass automation to cut costs, workers cannot rely on traditional job stability. Survival in the labor market will require shifting focus to areas where AI fundamentally struggles.
Lean into Non-Linear and High-Context Work: AI excels at pattern recognition, data synthesis, and predictable tasks. Humans must pivot toward roles that require high emotional intelligence, deep contextual nuance, physical adaptability, and complex tactile skills (e.g., specialized trades, healthcare, localized community management, and crisis resolution).
Emphasize "Human-in-the-Loop" Oversight: Rather than competing with AI, workers should position themselves as the necessary moral and logical layer of oversight. Learn to audit, prompt, and critically evaluate machine outputs, ensuring that human accountability remains attached to commercial decisions.
Build Localized, Independent Economic Networks: To hedge against corporate instability, people can foster hyper-local micro-economies. Supporting local agriculture, trade skills, and community-cooperative businesses creates a parallel economic buffer that is less vulnerable to sudden digital displacement.
2. Intellectual Protection: Cultivating an "Ecology of Communication"
With AI capable of flooding the internet with hyper-realistic synthetic text, images, and video, the public digital square will become increasingly untrustworthy.
Practice Active Information Decoupling: Move away from algorithmic feeds that profit off outrage and synthetic engagement. Reclaim "cognitive sovereignty" by intentionally seeking out verified, high-trust investigative journalism and local, peer-to-peer reporting.
Reclaim the "Patience for Truth": Pope Leo warned that instant algorithmic answers erode the human capacity for deep reflection. Adaptation means training oneself—and especially children—in the slower, rigorous habits of long-form reading, historical cross-referencing, and philosophical skepticism.
Establish Low-Tech Verification Protocols: Within families, businesses, and communities, establish clear, un-fakeable "analog" verification methods (such as verbal code words or physical-presence requirements) to protect against advanced AI voice-cloning and deepfake scams.
Continued
Delete3. Relational Resilience: Resisting "Simulated Care"
As corporations roll out highly convincing artificial companions and emotional wellness bots, society risks a profound loneliness epidemic.
Enforce Analog Sanctuaries: Families and communities should deliberately designate spaces and times entirely free from digital devices. Safeguarding the dinner table, community meetings, and face-to-face gatherings ensures that physical presence remains primary.
Value Vulnerability Over Optimization: Tech platforms train us to treat our lives as efficiency projects to be optimized. True resilience means embracing the messy, inefficient, and deeply rewarding realities of human relationships—caring for the sick, lingering in conversation, and supporting the elderly—realities a machine can simulate but never actually experience.
4. Turning Limits into Strengths
Perhaps the most radical advice for a tech-dominated future is a psychological shift. In a world obsessed with computational speed, human limitations—aging, exhaustion, sorrow, and the need for rest—are often treated by Silicon Valley as bugs to be fixed.
Pope Leo notes that our very limits are what bind us together. When the digital world accelerates past human capacity, successfully adapting means refusing to match its speed. True resilience lies in double-downing on our humanity: choosing community solidarity over isolation, critical thought over automated convenience, and physical presence over digital simulation”.
Reactions? Comments?
Anne thanks - I feel like I don't need to read 150 pages now! More seriously, these summaries entice me to delve into it. There are a lot of powerful insights in these summaries.
DeleteI should clarify: when I say "these summaries entice me to delve into it", the "it" is the encyclical, not AI! I already delve into AI, for fun and profit, i.e. because I'm interested in understanding it, and because professionally I'm now required to utilize it and be knowledgeable about it.
Delete" Pope Leo warned that instant algorithmic answers erode the human capacity for deep reflection. Adaptation means training oneself—and especially children—in the slower, rigorous habits of long-form reading, historical cross-referencing, and philosophical skepticism...
Delete[...]
"True resilience lies in doubling-down on our humanity: choosing ... critical thought over automated convenience..."
Amen to those observations. You all have seen me dabble in insta-homilizing with AI. I think I've mentioned this before: as one who preaches, I get a lot of spiritual benefits from the writing process: the reflecting, the research, the writing, the editing and assessing, and so on.
FWIW, I've never used AI to write a homily for me, and I hope I never do. That said, I have gradually leaned in to using it as a research assistant. For example: I preached this past Sunday, on Pentecost (I've been remiss in posting the homily - I'll get around to it soon). I asked AI many questions to make sure I wasn't misspeaking (a particular danger when it comes to the Trinity!) For example, I asked it, "Is it more theologically accurate for a Catholic to say that the Father and the Son have given us their Holy Spirit, or given us the Holy Spirit?" The answer is, the latter, for which it gave a cogent explanation.
Good ideas and thoughts. I think people are already starting to adapt to an AI world. Maybe partly by not believing anything, until you have verified it through reliable sources. It's unfortunate, but that is what we have to do.
ReplyDeleteI can see some useful applications. But honestly, I can't think of a single problem that I have that AI is going to solve. I'm stuck with slow and boring. Which is fine for me. The ones I am concerned about are the young people trying to start out in a career, when the lower rungs on the ladder have been eliminated. Such as my granddaughter who is interested clinical psychology. Are things such as "Good Help" going to replace entry level jobs? I guess they employ real people, but it seems like a side gig, rather than one where you could be self supporting.
So far I am very unimpressed by auto correct (I think that is AI?). It does a horrible job at predicting what I want to say on my tablet and on phone texts. I am a fairly good speller and I definitely have to proof read. Auto correct spells things right. Just doesn't guess the right words.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidwsilva/p/im-sorry-to-burst-your-bubble-you?r=dug1j&utm_medium=ios
ReplyDeleteInteresting Substack on the divergence between what AI really is and what the promoters say it is. AI is definitely the shiny new investment thing. It is sucking up money and the data centers are using up physical resources. But it’s not what the AI hucksters are selling.
I’m not really sure exactly what the AI promoters are promoting. I don’t actually pay much attention to that. I use Gemini a lot recently in researching alternative cancer treatments. I find it useful but also know that I have to continuously provide additional details about my general health, age, and details from the pathology report—adding details and asking follow-up questions often changes the AI recommendations. However I do find it useful because it brings up information that I can use to ask questions of my oncologist. It seems to me to work as an incredibly fast search engine that can quickly gather, organize and summarize the information it finds on the web but can’t be trusted to be 100% reliable. I have found too many errors in my minimal use of it. I look at it a bit like Snopes and Wiki - a good starting point for further research, but not an end point on which to base conclusions. My youngest son co- founded a niche tech company in 2014 that has expanded its client base from Australia to the US, U.K., Brazil and South Africa. He is CEO. He recently showed us some business reports, graphs etc that AI put together in a couple of hours. He said it previously took him a full week to prepare these reports. It seems a good tool but it won’t replace him as CEO - just help him work more efficiently.
DeleteStanley, thanks for that link. It's very interesting.
DeleteI plan to minimize my involvement with AI much like I have minimalized by involvement with TV over the years. Both seem to make life easier but ultimately are at the service of the marketplace in order to make their owners richer. Both result in huge changes in one's life without any thinking about them.
ReplyDeleteTV absorbed huge amounts leisure time, in fact all of the leisure time that the average person saved from having to do less paid work and less unpaid work plus it cut into a lot of other leisure activities such as involvement in community organizations.
TV also created community. At first, it looked good, family members eating TV dinners together. Most people watching news and other shows that their neighbors and coworkers watched. But then cable divided everyone up into old people and young people, liberals and conservatives. Now computers and digital phones have divided everyone even further.
Most people don't understand AI including the people who are involved in creating it. As the AI representative said at the rollout of the encyclical, AI is not a machine like and airplane. It is in fact build upon a huge amount of human data in order to appear human.
However it is a step beyond search, since AI takes into account it relationship with the person asking the question. That is why they need all the data processing places. So the same particular questions gets answered in a very different way depending upon the particular AI history of interacting with a particular person. It may also be answered differently depending upon the particular AI history with other persons asking similar questions.
All of this information may of course be sold to the marketplace that is interested in selling us things just as all of our views are used. This all offers many people with money the opportunity to manipulate us quite unconsciously much like TV often does.
The bottom line is that AI like TV threatens our intellectual and spiritual freedom. I have preferred to spend my time and money on books and CDs that I have chosen rather than experiences that have been chosen for me by others that do not have my interests at heart.
DeleteI see it differently. Technology has always changed our lives, but we make the choices of how to use it. I don’t believe that the technology itself threatens our intellectual or spiritual freedom. TV is now streaming, which gives viewers an enormous range of choices. There is a lot of stuff that we don’t choose to watch, but we now have far more choices for both education and entertainment that we had with network TV or even cable. And we can watch it on our own schedule. The sports fans have their games and bond in their Monday morning quarterbacking - sports definitely creates communities of both participants and fans. I am not a sports fan but I think sports bring more people together than almost any other feature of American culture. Music lovers, lovers of literature, politics, lovers of history, music, religion, science, science fiction, home decorating, chess, gardening, cooking, travel and cultures, archeology, theology, etc etc ETC are available along with all the trash. The choice is ours, just as we choose books and CDs we prefer- those offerings are also from corporations seeking profits. They don’t force us to buy them though. We still can choose our experiences - academic lectures, live music, participation in sports, participation in religion, hiking, travel, attending symphonies or going to jazz festivals, etc, etc, etc. Community still exists - families find community in the schools their children attend, and the music, sports, scouting and other out of school activities of their children. Most find some sort of community at their workplaces, churches, citizens associations, volunteer activities, neighborhood walking groups,, amateur sports (now more often adult soccer, basketball or softball teams than bowling). Many find community at their gyms. Our supplemental insurance covers membership at several local gyms. One has extensive “gentle” exercise class offerings for senior citizens as well as scheduled gatherings of “seniors” who converse with free coffee in their cafe. I have noted that a lot of older women have bonded at their senior yoga and Zumba classes, heading for the cafe after class. Many women in our age are widowed or divorced and outnumber the men. They seem to form little communities at the gym more often than the older men, who are fewer in number.
DeleteAI is a powerful tool, but whether it is used to advance good or harm is up to the choices made by the humans who use it. As citizens it is up to us to choose good leaders, something we have failed at miserably since 2016. But we didn’t fail because of AI. We have failed to teach people how to choose reliable, trustworthy sources of information. We have failed to educate them in how to spot lies in the internet, a problem that is now greatly more challenging than ever with AI. We have failed to teach critical thinking. AI is here — there is no going back. Every parish should begin with educating Catholics on the contents of Leo’s encyclical, offering classes for all age groups. This may be especially important with youth education programs as the young are usually early adopters of technology. So the parents need to know understand it too so that they can set guardrails. It presents even greater dangers than social media alone. Many communities have become aware of the environmental dangers of AI power farms and are even fighting them in red states. This fight is up to us through our choices in electing good leaders. I’m guessing that we will fail though, just as we have failed to stop MAGA in evangelical communities and among white Catholics.
"So the parents need to know understand it too so that they can set guardrails."
DeleteI agree that children are more vulnerable than adults. It would be helpful if the AI tools had guardrails built into them that parents could configure as they wish.