Does the pope have an editor? If I could presume to take on this role for a second, then I might have one little note for Leo XIV after reading his new encyclical about artificial intelligence: Great stuff, but lose the Tower of Babel. It’s a tired cliché. Most of us have already been told that those who would seek to be like God will see their ambitions crash to the ground. And in this instance, the lesson has a limited audience. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the tower builders should have an image of the tower tattooed on their chest. But the rest of us, who mostly suffer the fallout from those godlike men and their aspirations, are just trying to get through our days.
Fortunately, Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (or “Magnificent Humanity”), is much more than a slap at Silicon Valley. The pope does two very useful things in his screed: He identifies the threat of AI as a form of dehumanization, and then he asserts, with passion and clear eyes, what is actually worth saving about being human. This second part of the argument is often left vague—or left out—when people talk about the threat of AI. Many people feel uncomfortable with a technology that seems to be squeezing some essential-feeling elements, like thinking, out of our lives, but then don’t spend a lot of time trying to articulate what is being lost.
The ideology of Silicon Valley is one of inevitability: History is moving, with Hegelian determinism, in one direction—toward superintelligent machines—and anyone who questions or worries about what this means is made to feel like they are waving their hands in the path of a freight train. I’ve had so many conversations with proselytizers that end with, Well, it’s coming, so you better get used to it. What Leo does is push back against the inevitability.
He chose to release his encyclical on the anniversary of a previous Pope Leo’s treatise, in 1891, which looked at the ways industrialization was flattening human beings. The current pope clearly wants to draw connections among various forms of dehumanization, based on more than a century’s worth of new evidence, AI being only the latest assailant. These analogies, comparing the crushing weight of factory work or the inhumanity of totalitarianism to Silicon Valley’s handwork, might seem disheartening (and even a little overwrought to some). But Leo’s point is that people have always found ways to resist. They have advocated for laws to protect workers, demanded human- and civil-rights laws, chosen not to surrender. He is arguing against passivity. “Most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best,” the pope writes. But the stakes as he’s describing them demand much more. He lists questions that “can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”
First, he suggests, we need to appreciate what it means to be human, to know what we’re defending. I wondered if the pope would offer anything more than the simple Christian response that God’s presence resides in all of us. This would seem to make the case a fairly straightforward one. If we are each reflections of an ultimate divine entity, then it seems obvious why we should care to preserve what is small and fallible and slow about us. In spite of those weaknesses, God is in us, and therefore we should not mess with something that has that spark. We should protect our fallibility because it is part of an infallible order.
[Read: The coming humanist renaissance]
This is an element of Leo’s argument, of course—he is, after all, head of the Catholic Church—but he also makes clear that humanity, as he describes it, should be exalted because of its “woundedness” just as much as its “grandeur.” Our limitations are the key to understanding what makes humans special. “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” he writes. You don’t even need to believe in God to appreciate that our uniqueness derives from the friction produced by our “vulnerability, suffering and failure.” To smooth out this roughness would be to get rid of what is most essential about us. Along those lines, this is maybe my favorite passage from the encyclical:
To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.
I am not a Christian, and really not much of a believer at all, but this articulates so well what I feel AI is taking from us. What makes a human life valuable is struggle. The things we achieve, the love, the give-and-take of families and communities—all of it involves effort. What AI is offering to do is remove struggle and effort. You could argue, and many do, that it will help improve our quality of life in many realms—if it finds new lifesaving drugs more quickly, for example. But the pope’s point is that no more than a small handful of people have control over how and where to apply AI. And they are letting the value of efficiency trump everything else. Dehumanization is what follows. And the only way to resist it is by exalting in our limitations, in our struggles, as a good thing.
I will always prefer reading a novel written by a human precisely because I know the limitations placed on a human brain. The opportunity to commune with such a brain, one that has pushed against those boundaries to create Middlemarch, is a thousand times more fulfilling than reading what a purportedly boundless machine has produced. The same could be said for any number of other areas of life—dating, traveling, working—in which the friction is what produces meaning. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected,” Leo writes; “for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”
[Read: Pope Leo’s unsettling vision of the future]
Does it take a pope to say this? Of course not. But it matters that he did. People think of him as a moral counterweight to the political leaders who are full of promises yet short on guidance. What I took from Leo’s words though had nothing to do with good and evil or the state of my soul or Christ’s example. I thought about the pursuit of beauty, which is the closest I have to a faith. What I value most about being human is the infinite ways we have to make meaning for ourselves. This might be the culture we create or the cities we build or the stories we tell our children at night. All of it results from confronting our human condition with what we have at hand. If that goes away, if instead the machines, which have never had to put any effort into anything, are the ones developing our world, what will happen to beauty? (The pope, notably, couldn’t resist naming some earthly art that was meaningful to him: “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler’s List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion.”)
In addition to the Tower of Babel, Leo cites another biblical touchstone in his encyclical. As his editor, I would keep this one. It’s from the Book of Nehemiah. In it, the prophet decides to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, which was destroyed by the Babylonians. The pope calls out the fact that the rebuilding was a group effort, a human effort. I read the episode, and it’s essentially an exhaustive list of the artisans and famous local families and priests who all lend a hand. There is no magic, no divine involvement, really—just lots of people sweating together and moving stones. How satisfying it must have been to complete the task, to know they did it themselves. “So we built the wall,” Nehemiah writes. “For the people had a mind to work.”
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