Everyone has missed Pope
Leo’s true enemy, and it’s not AI
Everyone
has missed Pope Leo’s true enemy, and it’s not AI
Opinion by Elise
Morrison
Pope Leo XIV’s much-anticipated first encyclical
on safeguarding the human person in
the time of AI was released last
month to much fanfare and discussion. A renewal of the Rerum Novarum of
Pope Leo XIII (1891), this encyclical sought to speak of the “res novae (new
issues) of our time” – such as AI.
As he writes: “Humanity, created by God in all its
grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of
Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
Commentators thus far seemed to have focused on what
he has to say about what he calls the “Babel syndrome”, yet have missed something significant: most of the
encyclical is dedicated to the more fundamental Christian question of how we
might think about building the City of God here on earth, how we can work
together to “foster a peaceful, just and dignified life in community within
today’s ‘cities’”.
If you’re not Catholic, you might be asking: “Well,
what does it matter what the Pope has to say?”
Nearly 20 years after the financial crisis of 2008,
amid the climate crisis and the mental health crisis, with wars in Ukraine and
Iran, the turmoil of Donald Trump’s
second term, and, as the encyclical
is concerned with, the rise of an artificial intelligence which no longer
serves us, but we serve it, it is clear that the modern world isn’t working for
us.
The Pope’s encyclical has
a message that is more fundamental than
a critique of AI - Remo
Casilli/Reuters
The real problem is that the current political
offerings available to us are fundamentally untethered from what Catholic
social teaching might call “the Good” or “the Real”, and instead remain
beholden to the technocratic doctrines that have prevailed for much of the
post-Cold War period.
Today’s politics have prioritised efficiency and
profit over the values of peace, justice, and fraternity. Pope Leo’s
encyclical, by contrast, draws on the Church’s “ancient wisdom” to
generate fresh ways of
approaching social, political and economic questions.
The proliferation of AI is just one symptom of this
broken society. If we are unable to connect our use of technology to virtues
which serve us, we will remain servants to it.
And so the Pope warns us: “When it [technology]
becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what
matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of
exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever
greater efficiency.”
But it’s not difficult to look around and see how life
more generally has become transactional in the past 50 years.
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