The Patriot Post® · The AI Encyclical and Our Choice to Make
Pope Leo XIV has written his first encyclical. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” the 42,000-plus-word open letter is a staunch defense of human dignity in the face of the Artificial Intelligence tech revolution.
Pope Leo and Christopher Olah, a cofounder of Anthropic, also held a joint conference discussing AI and its role in the coming years.
This encyclical intentionally coincides with the date of a letter from the last Pope Leo regarding the social ramifications of the Industrial Revolution. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” gives counsel during a time of mechanical and industrial change, just as “Magnifica Humanitas” comes amid a technological change.
AI presents real concerns for real people. It threatens to take jobs, overburden our infrastructure, destroy land, and even make the Internet more of a cesspool than it already is.
Pope Leo XIV does not condemn AI, but rather urges caution and regulation.
First and foremost, the pope underscores that AI is not human and never can be. Humans are created in the image of God. We can create, love, offer insight, make judgments based on morals and practical reasoning, etc.
Conversely, AI is a mirror. It recognizes patterns and can spit out facts faster than any human, but it has no capacity for emotion or true creation. It also reflects the biases and flaws of those who program it. Kind of like Leftmedia polling (a.k.a. pollaganda).
Pope Leo presents two directions that AI creators can go.
1.) They can be like those figures in the Bible who built the tower of Babel to be like God.
“Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.’” (Genesis 11:4)
God, of course, ultimately confused their languages, and the building project was abandoned. But as Pope Leo writes:
When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused, and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.
2.) They can rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
After the Babylonian exile, Nehemiah sought to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, which had been utterly destroyed by invading armies. He fasted, prayed, and organized his people. With God at the center, the Jews rebuild their city walls.
As Pope Leo concludes:
Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.
Unfortunately, the response from some of those on the cutting edge of this new tech has been less than thrilling.
For example, Jeremy Nixon, one of the founders of A.G.I. House — a hacking outfit — was interviewed by The New York Times for his opinion on the Pope Leo-Christopher Olah forum discussing AI safeguards. Nixon, whose tenor was arrogance and scoffing, held the pope’s opinion on the subject in very low regard.
“It did not seem like the church had thought deeply about what their independent perspective was on AI,” he said. “It is not clear they could do that even if they tried. They couldn’t have a position on it because they don’t understand it.”
The encyclical is over 42,000 words long; it’s hard to say that the Catholic Church hasn’t been thinking long and hard about essential questions like “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?”
Nixon believes AI will “achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve.” He doesn’t quite come out and say it, but men in this field are often transhumanists or posthumanists and do not believe in God at all. They want to build their own idols.
At a political level, putting restrictions on AI while we are in a tech race against China does sound like tying one arm behind our backs. Nevertheless, Pope Leo’s warning about AI will likely influence policy worldwide, whether the tech bros like it or not.
Just like the two biblical examples Pope Leo cited, we have a choice to make: the Tower of Babel or the walls of Jerusalem.
Perhaps the real question is this: Can we go the walls-of-Jerusalem route and still beat China? Or will we lose our souls building Silicon idols?