Pope Leo XIV warned about the risks of AI and unrestricted technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas The Pope’s manifesto is on “The Protection of the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, in which he discusses the dangers of AI-powered warfare, the impact of AI on labor, and the need for new legal and ethical frameworks to regulate the technology.
In his papal encyclical – a kind of open letter of the Catholic Church – Pope Leo emphasized the economic and social turmoil that rapid AI adoption is creating, with inadequate protections for individuals that jeopardize human dignity. He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying that society must avoid “Babel syndrome”, which he describes as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a language – even a digital language – can translate everything, including the mystery of the individual, into data and performance.”
Pope Leo’s letter touches on key areas of modern life in which AI has become deeply embedded: job loss and labor generally, AI-driven warfare, and children’s exposure to AI tools and materials, among other topics. Above all, the encyclical calls for making the dignity of human beings a central part of decision-making and governance. The letter is “an appeal to moral and social conscience that protects the primacy of the human person, to ensure that it will always be the human intellect, with its conscience and freedom, that guides technological innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits,” Leo writes.
The letter, which runs to more than 42,000 words, calls for “prudence, rigorous assessment and even, at times, slowness in adopting AI” as “the exercise of responsible care for the human family.” Some of the proposals:
The impact of AI on humanity has been a defining issue for Pope Leo: he chose his papal name in the context of the Industrial Revolution, during which his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, had issued his own encyclical on the protection of workers amid technological advances. Pope Leo has also been involved with the AI industry – Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah was in attendance as the Pope presented his encyclical on Monday. politico Representatives from Amazon, Meta and Google have reportedly met with Vatican officials ahead of Monday’s publication of the encyclical as the tech industry tries to influence the church’s position. (There is also a subgroup trying to give the Pope an “AGI-pill”; Magnifica Humanitas Artificial general intelligence is not explicitly mentioned.)
There is no absolute objection to encyclopedic AI. Rather, Pope Leo calls for the “disarmament” of technology – in the military sense and also in the economic and social sense. He says that AI should not be used to compete for power or to monopolize society.
“Disarmament means discrediting the notion that technological power automatically grants the right to rule. Disarmament does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”
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