When I heard my son’s heartbeat for the first time, it sounded to me like a hammer on an anvil. That revelation was when I knew I really was going to be a father, because that noisy ticker belonged to a healthy baby. Today my son is almost 17 months old. I thought about this holy heartbeat while reading Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical published this week , which has the subtitle “On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” A quick primer for non-Catholics: An encyclical, or “circular letter,” is a pope’s addition to Catholic teaching via an examination of an important area of human life. The text is written by a team of Vatican theologians and priests, but the pope directs and reviews and rewrites parts and then puts his name on it. Popes have opined in encyclicals on everything from the ethics of loan interests (Pope Benedict XIV in Vix Pervenit: On Usury and Other Dishonest Profits, from 1745) to contraception (Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae: Of Human Life). Encyclicals percolate into the Catholic intellectual ecosystem, where they are read by laypeople and clergy, and are then taught in Catholic high schools and colleges.
The most groundbreaking encyclical of the modern era was Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor, published in 1891. It was a reaction to the changes in human culture and technology wrought by the Industrial Revolution. The document was one of the first institutional defenses of labor unions, living wages, and shorter work weeks, and it sought to confront the modern world more bluntly than previous popes had done. Last year, when the cardinals elected Robert Prevost as the successor to Pope Francis, the first American pope (to my delight a Chicago White Sox fan) chose the name Leo XIV as arguably a nod to that previous pope. A signal that Prevost wanted to tackle our latest industrial revolution led by Silicon Valley.
Leo is a good man for the job. The 70-year-old pontiff studied mathematics at Villanova University and is online. He understands the modern information ecosystem in a way none of his predecessors did. He grasps, for example, how dangerous it is that the internet has destroyed professional journalism, along with society’s regard for the truth. In his encyclical, Leo quotes philosopher Hannah Arendt who wrote that the ideal subjects of fascism are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
In a break with tradition, the pope appeared in person on Monday to present the encyclical, and invited Christopher Olah, a cofounder of San Francisco-based Anthropic, developer of the Claude large language model, to be in the room with him. Leo’s encyclical weighs in at around 42,000 words and covers a wide range of topics. It calls for better treatment of women, celebrates work as essential to human creativity and flourishing, denounces the normalization of war, and apologizes for the church taking “eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.” It also calls the “treatment of migrants, refugees and those forced to move due to poverty, violence, climate change and environmental disasters” a moral litmus test.
Contrary to the rigid thinking of ancient pontiffs, this encyclical does not claim absolute authority. These days, Galileo’s head is off the block. The Church “does not claim to offer ‘a definitive opinion’, but recognizes the importance of listening to scientific research and of encouraging a serious and honest debate among experts while welcoming a diversity of opinions” writes Leo. Where the encyclical does make a clear argument is in parsing what AI systems controlled by corporations might do to human beings. This is the part of life where for-profit computer programs get us addicted to screen scrolling and collect, buy and sell data about the quantifiable parts of our lives, while then selling us conversations with AI-driven chatbots that claim near-infinite knowledge and wisdom. This is a danger not about doomsday scares of AI systems blowing up the world, but instead of the subtle erosion of our interior lives and inner freedom as humans seeking truth. According to the pope, we must be open to learning about life and seeking truth ourselves, without the assistance of AI.
“So-called artificial intelligences,” he writes:
…do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. They don’t have a ‘moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of ‘learning,’ their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.
Some of you, even atheists not inclined to engage at all with metaphysics, will read this and think that this seems rather obvious. No shit we need to keep phones away from kids and share more meals together (both recommended by the encyclical). But common sense is one thing, phrasing it in the clarion call of a moral argument is another. Triumphalist cultures easily veer into madness, and with the new technocracy we are currently in the sway of one. When you command power over an exciting new way of life, it is tempting to declare that you have found a final solution or two to essential human problems. In that context, Leo’s message is incredibly important.
In part, the encyclical “is a reaction to tech bro culture and its masters of the universe approach,” said Jose Lopez, a professor of physics at Seton Hall University and a practicing Catholic. “The Vatican has the clarity that [AI] is not an alien intelligence, and Pope Leo being a mathematician gets that. It’s a bunch of code that is able to process information, not a miracle of divine intelligence from another universe,” he told me. The tech revolution was launched by young men in their 20s and 30s, and they for the most part have defined the culture of the internet and AI. As young men do, they dream of living forever, and for the most part don’t have time for received wisdom and tradition. They talk about the human brain as “software” and the body as “hardware.” But, as Lopez explained, what they’re missing is “we understand a lot more about AI than we do about the human brain.”
Leo uses the analogy of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis, where humans in the land of Shinar attempted to build a tower that reached the heavens. God punished the builders’ arrogance and blocked the tower by confusing them with a multitude of languages. “We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel syndrome’, namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language – even a digital one – can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance,” writes Leo. The pope reminds us that we are more than our processing capabilities as they are valued by the marketplace. That might be how tech bros see themselves, but human beings have infinite dignity, even if they accomplish nothing in life.
To be sure, the document is not a Luddite screed. Leo recognizes AI’s usefulness in conducting scientific research and eliminating some drudgery. “Over the centuries, technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity,” writes Leo. “At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good.” The encyclical is a serious, earnest study by people who’ve interviewed experts and read the literature. It recognizes that current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, “but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’ As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.”
There’s a clear-eyed description of the environmental impact, because AI systems require “enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources.” As data centers mushroom, “the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure.” There’s also a caution given about how technology might upend labor. “Work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives,” writes Leo, in an echo of the previous pontiff whose name he took. “It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment…. the goal is to enable each person to live with dignity through his or her own work.
Despite the biblical references, the encyclical has already been attacked by right-wing Catholics as lacking sufficient discussion of sin and redemption. But Leo closes with a very Christian message, describing the Virgin Mary finding out she’s pregnant. “Mary suddenly sees all of history through the lens of this revelation,” writes Leo. “Nothing has changed around her; the socio-political situation of her time remains the same. The Romans continue to control her land, and her people are still subjugated and humiliated. Yet, everything has changed within her, and this allows her to see what is invisible.”
I struggle with many aspects of my own Catholic faith, but the story of Mary speaks to me, because being human is a shared adventure full of mystery and revelation. I love the stories of other individual humans, whether they’re truth or fiction or in-between, from the Virgin Mary to my soulful Facebook-posting aunt Peggy. Being human means being authentically moved in your own heart in mysterious ways by revelations that don’t originate from aggregated data about other people collected by other people. Only you can know what it feels like for you to read Hamlet, see a solar eclipse, or hear your child’s heartbeat.
Someday, my boy will learn something about himself and be surprised. I hope to surprise him, too, not only with stories about how I was born in 1977 and my birth in Belgium was announced to my grandparents in America by telegram, but also by telling him the counterintuitive truth that it’s okay to struggle, or want something and feel the pain of not getting it. To renounce that adventure of failure and struggle “in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human,” writes Leo.
It’s the truths that aren’t obvious that need to be repeated.
The bleakest parts of the encyclical, and this isn’t Leo’s fault, are the proposed solutions. They’re based on policymakers and regulators doing the right thing. Here, for example, is one: “New collaborative efforts are needed among political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community in order to develop rapidly adequate shared regulations and protections, including at the international level.”
At a time of political insanity, that can seem like a nice dream.
But we must try. If we fail, at least it’ll be because we were in touch with our deepest desires, to live free from corporate-owned algorithms, and teach our children to be open to truth, pain, mystery, and the revelations that bang into our lives.
Or, as Leo puts it, quoting Gandalf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
