Pope Leo XIV revealed his first encyclical on Monday. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, it addresses “safeguarding the human individual within the time of synthetic intelligence.” And whereas AI is the hook, the issues Leo focuses on are older and extra pervasive: inequality, conflict, the erosion of democracy, and the focus of energy within the arms of those that don’t essentially care whether or not humanity writ massive stays magnificent.
All through the 200-page doc, which the pope offered alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of AI firm Anthropic, Leo argues that expertise constructed and ruled by a small elite can not, by definition, serve the frequent good.
“When such energy is concentrated within the arms of some, it tends to grow to be opaque and evade public oversight, rising the danger of distorted types of growth that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities,” he writes.
“In truth, as with each main technological shift, AI tends to amplify the facility of those that already possess financial assets, experience and entry to knowledge,” the encyclical continues, highlighting issues that elites can use their energy to “form info and consumption patterns, affect democratic processes and steer financial dynamics to their very own benefit.”
The encyclical comes just a few days after President Donald Trump delayed signing his executive order on AI, which might have given the federal government oversight over new fashions earlier than they’re launched, reportedly on the urging of VC investor and former White Home AI czar David Sacks.
Pope Leo known as for AI to be guided by “clear standards and efficient oversight” rooted in participation from communities that shall be affected by it. Extra concretely, Leo known as for an finish to the AI arms race — the push to construct “ever extra highly effective algorithms and bigger datasets” that firms and nations imagine will “safe geopolitical or business dominance.”
“To disarm means discrediting the idea that technical energy robotically confers the appropriate to manipulate,” he wrote.
Once more, these dynamics predate AI. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum addressed the identical focus of energy through the Industrial Revolution, however we needn’t look again that far. Think about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his deployment of the platform to assist elect Trump, or the hundreds of millions flowing from tech elites into tremendous PACs to dam AI regulation — patterns that clearly impressed Leo XIV’s work.
The pope arrives at a conclusion many have already reached: the surreal energy and capabilities of as we speak’s AI increase the stakes enormously.
Notre Dame Legislation Faculty professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and chair of the Meta Oversight Board, advised TechCrunch that AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes have “corroded our capability to acknowledge what’s true and what’s not true, and that basically has penalties for democratic politics.” The tech trade’s apply of “harvesting and manipulating” human knowledge, he added, poses “elementary challenges to cognitive freedom.”
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