(Adapted from a post on my Substack.)

Today, Pope Leo XIV released his long-awaited encyclical letter about artificial intelligence, addressed not just to the Catholic Church, but to all people of good will, all over the world. Titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), it is a powerful invitation to worldwide engagement on questions that I believe will decide the future of humankind.

I urge you all to read the encyclical itself, but I recognize that it is very long, and the theological language may be challenging, especially for LessWrong readers from outside the Catholic faith tradition. So I offer the following post as a guide to understanding this world-historic document in terms that I intend to be accessible to all, even if you’re not religious and not familiar with the technical details of AI.

That said, Magnifica Humanitas is long enough and dense enough that even a detailed summary is lengthy. So I will begin the post with an overview of high-level takeaways for those short on time. After that, I’ll give a summary of the entire encyclical, highlighting key passages, and contextualizing the questions that Pope Leo grapples with across the scientific and policy landscapes. I’ll analyze what’s notably said and left unsaid, and how the encyclical lays the groundwork for future engagement by the Church on these issues. In several areas, I offer respectful critiques of the encyclical intended as constructive suggestions for those future engagements.

Bottom line: Pope Leo gives us a wise and practical document, filled with forceful moral critiques of those who would use AI to exploit and dehumanize. He appreciates the benefits AI can bring, but urgently calls the world to the shared work and discernment necessary to achieve a flourishing future. The encyclical focuses on today’s technology, and future AI will pose new and even-more-urgent moral questions, so Magnifica Humanitas should be the beginning of the conversation, not its definitive final word.

14 High-Level Takeaways

1. As expected, it mostly focuses on mitigating risks and harms of AI rather than harnessing its benefits. But it’s clearly not anti-AI or Luddite in orientation. Pope Leo recognizes AI’s profound potential for both good and ill, but warns that this does not make it inherently neutral. Rather, he says, it takes on the face of the humans who design it, fund it, regulate it, and use it.

2. Surprisingly, there is not any explicit mention of AGI. Nor is there explicit mention of catastrophic risk or radical longevity medicine. These were all mentioned in January 2025 in the Church’s previous AI document, Antiqua et Nova, so the omission is notable. Those questions all entail qualitatively new moral challenges, so another encyclical will be needed soon to address them—hopefully before AGI arrives.

3. Likewise, although Leo expresses concern about unemployment from AI, he does not appear to envision a scenario of widespread unemployment or truly transformative impacts on the economy. A growing consensus among AI scientists and economists expects these impacts to be truly profound. If this is correct, the remedies suggested in this encyclical will not be sufficient.

4. Leo highlights the single most important fact that everyone must understand to form the right intuitions about AI: it is not designed like a traditional machine, but organically grown like a creature in a lab. This means that the people who develop it don’t fully understand how it works, and don’t know all its capabilities. He deserves immense credit for expressing this so clearly to a global audience.

5. I and many others were anxious to see how Leo would address philosophies of transhumanism and related questions like whether AI could ever be conscious or experience suffering. Leo admirably recognizes nuance here, critiquing unhealthy forms of transhumanism without a blanket condemnation. While rejecting AI’s current consciousness, he silently avoids slamming the door on the possibility of future models suffering. More research is needed, as well as dialogue between scientists and theologians, and it would have been unwise to preempt that with a definitive statement here.

6. A good test for whether a social encyclical is good is whether it makes any powerful people angry. Magnifica Humanitas almost certainly will. Especially with its blistering condemnations of aggressive war, and of exploitation and dehumanization in the supply chain for AI.

7. A key theme is that AI risks entrenching a “technocratic paradigm” that neglects a full vision of our humanity. Humans, Leo says, should never be reduced to statistics or cogs in a machine. Individual rights, especially of vulnerable people, must never be sacrificed in pursuit of efficiency, profit, and power. The alternative to the technocratic paradigm is integral human development. This is a recognition that human needs and aspirations aren’t fungible—no amount of food can satisfy someone starving for love, and no amount of love can prevent physical starvation. So the different facets of human fulfillment must all be developed together. The implication is that even if AI gives us material abundance, this does not in itself prevent poverty in domains like political freedom, familial love, and spiritual fulfillment.

8. Related to the technocratic paradigm, Leo argues against uses of AI that centralize power and leave ordinary people without meaningful agency over their lives. He describes this as a struggle of homogeneity versus diversity, centralized direction versus individual freedom, top-down control versus shared responsibility.

9. Pope Leo affirms private property and free enterprise, but insists that immaterial things like “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data” are resources that must be ordered toward the common good. It’s a vision of shared flourishing and interdependence. He calls for an end to GDP as our dominant measure of prosperity, because it fails to capture noneconomic goods and does not account for questions of justice.

10. Characterizing cyberspace as a new battleground, Leo criticizes the exploitative behavior of social media companies, but emphasizes the responsibility all users share in promoting a healthier digital environment.

11. Leo issues a ringing call that “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.” By this, he means not just a renunciation of war but a rejection of competitive and adversarial “arms race” framings that increase risk to all humanity. As he said in his live presentation today, AI must be turned away from development paths that lead to “domination, exclusion, and death.” Instead: “Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all.” This is direct support to the ongoing international efforts toward AGI safety and shared democratic governance of this technology.

12. He directly addresses AI scientists and lab leaders, warning them that if they fail to consider the broader moral implications of their work, they risk unwittingly creating technology that causes grave harm.

13. Leo invites all people to hope, and to direct participation in this great challenge of our time. Making AI go well for humanity, he tells us, is a work that every person can play a meaningful part in.

14. He quotes Gandalf.

Summary and Commentary

Introduction

At the beginning of the Introduction, Pope Leo frames artificial intelligence as thrusting a choice upon humanity: “to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” In essence, the Tower of Babel represents efforts to transcend our limitations by human technical ingenuity alone—which he contrasts with a future where our most fundamental transcendence comes through love, justice, and wisdom. Christianity identifies these values with God, but the message equally applies to those with a nontheistic worldview.

Leo XIV explicitly invokes the work of his predecessor Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (Latin for “on the new things”) addressed the socioeconomic impacts of the Industrial Revolution. This became the foundation of what we now call Catholic Social Teaching. This was the first major Church document to address issues like working conditions, workers’ rights, and labor unions—which had previously been considered outside the scope of theology.

Leo XIV notes that in the 19^th century some objected to Rerum Novarum, arguing that the Church “should not waste energy on worldly matters, but instead focus on communicating the message of eternal life.” But he says Leo XIII “responded with realism and wisdom, saying that the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.”

This was a major evolution in the Church’s approach to socioeconomic problems like poverty. From the life of Jesus until 1891, the Church mostly saw poverty in personal terms. If Christians saw a poor person, the ideal response was essentially: “You’re hungry, so here’s a loaf of bread.” But Catholic Social Teaching broadened the lens to seeing poverty in systemic terms. Now, in addition to direct charity, the response is: “Let’s work together as a Church and as a society to create a more just system so that you’re not poor and hungry in the first place.” This not only changed Roman Catholic thinking, but had profound effects on how other faiths and secular institutions have approached poverty over the past century.

Leo XIV recognizes that AI may have socioeconomic impacts at least as profound as the Industrial Revolution, so frames this encyclical as applying Catholic Social Teaching to the challenges of this new revolution. Rejecting a narrowly religious mission, both Leos assert the Church’s concern for the earthly dignity and wellbeing of all humans.

Next, Leo makes clear that he is not fundamentally anti-AI: “Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as ‘a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.’” The concerns he raises are about irresponsible or unjust development and use of AI.

Then, Leo correctly observes that AI is different from the technological revolutions of the 20^th century because it is mainly controlled not by governments but by “private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.” This suggests we need new ethical frameworks and policy mechanisms for effectively keeping AI under democratic control and oriented toward the common good.

Sidebar: many Americans misunderstand Catholic references to “the common good.” The Church supports healthy private enterprise—this term doesn’t imply communist collectivism. Nor does it imply a utilitarian focus on “the greatest good for the greatest number,” or a libertarian focus on just maximizing the sum total of private wellbeing. Rather, the Church understands the common good to be the interconnected set of moral, legal, and economic conditions in which every person’s rights are respected and they have a dignified opportunity to pursue flourishing and fulfillment. Concretely, this means that technology must be used in a way that recognizes us as members of a shared human family—injustice and exploitation against a few cannot be justified by counting up the private benefits to others.

Returning to the tower versus city metaphor, Leo recalls the prophet Nehemiah leading rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem in the 5^th century B.C. and emphasizes that “No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part.” Rather, all people “are given their own section of the wall: scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities.” The struggle, to Leo, is homogeneity versus diversity, centralized direction versus individual freedom, top-down control versus shared responsibility.

Leo has a deep recognition of AI’s dual-use potential: to help liberate us from poverty and disease, or to enslave and wound us. But dual-use does not mean inherent neutrality. AI, Leo says, is “never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it” [the Spanish version is much more poetic and apt, saying that AI “takes on the face” of its creators].

In a notable passage, Pope Leo calls for “accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.” This is wise counsel, but when we zoom in to consider specific cases, the picture becomes much more complicated. In some cases, much of the secular world agrees on limitations that should be accepted. For example, programs like the Special Olympics call humanity to embrace people with intellectual disabilities and celebrate their human dignity. On the other hand, cancer is a weakness of humanity literally programmed into our genes, but the Church strongly supports cancer research. Over the coming decade, AI will give us unprecedented ability to control our biology, encompassing dozens of cases in the gray area between intellectual disabilities and cancer, such as longevity medicine. No simple rule will suffice. The world will need Pope Leo’s deeper engagement on specific questions in order to navigate this fraught path.

Although AI is a new technology, the deeper moral challenge is ancient. Leo observes that “in every age, the risk looms of building an inhuman and more unjust world.”

Chapter One

In Chapter One, Pope Leo summarizes the history of Catholic Social Teaching, emphasizing its organic development over time, with each new idea in harmonious continuity with the rest. In essence, he uses this chapter to situate Magnifica Humanitas in its proper context—not as a change of policy or a break with the past, but the natural conclusion of applying ancient principles to today’s challenges. He also rejects the fundamentalist view that Christian teaching is frozen like a time capsule from the time of Jesus. Rather, he frames the Church as journeying through history alongside humanity, with its teaching growing and deepening from its dialogue with the “new things” of each era. The underlying values are eternal, but the Church must learn from history and human experience in order to apply them justly.

Leo then clarifies the proper relationship of the Church to the secular world. Drawing on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, he stresses that the church is not trying to impose its values on others, but to work in solidarity with the wider world and to offer its message as a means of social and personal healing.

In the remainder of the chapter, he highlights key insights from his predecessors that have shaped the Church’s social teachings.

Pope Pius XII, he says, “affirmed the need for a sound rule of law for guarding against the abuse of power, and he recognized democracy as a means for ensuring the proper exercise of authority. At the same time, he warned against any attempt to base law on utility or force, recalling that an international order governed by the advantage of the strongest exposes weaker peoples to oppression and fundamentally undermines trust between nations.” In short, the Church supports democratic control of societies and rejects the logic of “might makes right.”

Pope John XXIII widened the scope of Catholic Social Teaching itself. He addressed his message not just to Catholics but to “all people of good will.” Leo emphasizes that this broad engagement outside the walls of the Church to improve social conditions is not “tactical” (i.e. building up credibility and good will to then convert people to Catholicism) but an integral part of the Church’s mission, and an effort to be undertaken for its own sake.

Drawing on teachings of Pope Paul VI, he argues that peace is “not reduced to the mere absence of war, but took shape within the scope of integral human development … the transition from less human to more human living conditions.” That is, some material and social conditions recognize people’s inherent dignity and humanity more than others, and we should work toward conditions that do this better. So the goal for engaging with AI is to first discern which conditions promote humanity and then steer AI’s development and use toward promoting those conditions. And so, Leo says, “the Gospel remains relevant because it provides the criteria for recognizing what humanizes or dehumanizes and what liberates or oppresses in ever-changing situations.”

Near the end of the chapter, he quotes Pope Francis’s memorable insistence on a Church where we allow ourselves to be “evangelized by the poor”—to have our hearts transformed by direct human encounters with people who are suffering.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two explores the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching and how they follow naturally from the Church’s understanding of human nature and human dignity. “Human dignity,” Leo says, “does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.”

Leo emphasizes that human rights must rest upon a universal foundation to be secure. To the Church, this foundation is God. Some nontheistic people also invoke a foundation on universal moral truths. But others see rights as granted to us by human governments or social conventions. If this latter view prevails, Leo warns, those same structures can take them away: “it is conceivable that rights considered untouchable today might, in the future, end up being questioned or denied by those in power, perhaps after having obtained only an apparent consensus from populations that are frightened or manipulated.” Left unstated here is AI’s enormous potential to assist the powerful in this manipulation.

What follows is an overview of five core principles of Catholic Social Teaching: the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.

The shared obligation to promote the common good, as I summarized above, refers to the interconnected set of conditions that promote human rights and human flourishing. The Church recognizes that humans will still have “differing interests and frequent disagreements,” but amidst those conflicts we must not lose sight of our fundamental interconnectedness. As an analogy, if two brothers steal money from their sister and invest it for huge profits, the total family wealth has increased, but the collective good of the family has been damaged. In a similar way, we cannot measure the common good of the human family merely by counting up everyone’s individual wellbeing. We must reject arrangements that increase total individual wellbeing by violating the human rights of some.

In a poignant line, Pope Leo concedes that amidst current global conflicts, appealing to the common good of humanity “sounds like madness. Yet we must not lose hope.”

In a line sure to ruffle feathers both in the White House and the Kremlin, Pope Leo underscores that “any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable.”

The universal destination of goods is the idea that “the earth’s goods—soil, water, air and natural resources—are given by God to the entire human family to sustain the lives of all, and that every person has an inherent right to the use of such goods, both now and in the future.” Leo adds to this the benefits of immaterial goods like “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.” The Church supports private property and free enterprise as good ways to promote the common good, but insists that these be implemented with a recognition that all people share in a basic right to a just portion of these resources.

Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made at the most local level possible that’s consistent with the common good. For some issues, like national defense and pandemic response, national governments are necessary. But on issues like career development, childrearing, and urban planning, the Church asserts that individuals, families, and cities should have as much freedom as practical, rather than following top-down orders from distant authorities.

While this principle was developed with government hierarchies in mind, Pope Leo notes that it also applies to companies that control AI. He recognizes the potential for AI to impose top-down decisions that would rightly require the input of local communities. “When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms,” he says, “as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.”

Solidarity is the principle that our interconnectedness imposes mutual moral obligations to each other. It is, Leo says, “the concrete recognition that the future of each individual is connected to the future of all.” Solidarity implies duty of each person to “take[] part in the life of the community—by staying informed, engaging with others, making their voice heard and contributing to public decisions and choices.”

In a beautiful passage, Leo reminds us that “we are not merely neighbors to one another, but entrusted to each other, so that each of us may take responsibility, as best we can, for the lives and wounds of our brothers and sisters.”

Leo also highlights intergenerational justice, which was a key theme of Benedict XVI and Francis. Solidarity, he says, demands an “ability to forego immediate benefits in order to create opportunities for others in the future” and “that decisions regarding data, algorithms, platforms and artificial intelligence take into account not only the immediate benefit for a few, but also the impact on all peoples and on future generations.” In essence, just as environmental pollution saves money but impacts children not yet born, irresponsible development and use of AI can create both short-term profit and socioeconomic conditions that harm our descendants.

Here, Leo extends Francis’s concern for the physical environment to the “digital ecosystem.” This is a key point. Much like throwing trash on the ground degrades the environment for everyone, if you watch misinformation or like hateful posts, social media algorithms will spread them to your friends and family. Solidarity obliges us to resist that temptation.

Finally, social justice is the idea that the morality of a society hinges on how it treats the vulnerable. In the Gospels, Leo reminds us, Jesus “identifies himself with the lowly, the sick, the imprisoned and strangers.” Therefore, “social justice begins with the least among us… the poor, migrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, victims of violence and people living in urban or existential peripheries.” Catholic Social Teaching calls this the “preferential option for the poor.” This doesn’t mean that God loves the rich less. But it means that there is a special priority on helping the marginalized of society, just as a mother will prioritize buying medicine for a sick son over candy for a healthy daughter.

Leo recognizes that AI has the potential to disproportionately harm these vulnerable people and create “new forms of exclusion and deprivation of freedoms: individuals and peoples hindered or denied access to basic technologies, communities exposed to invasive surveillance and social groups penalized by opaque algorithms that perpetuate prejudice and discrimination.” This builds on Pope Francis’s concern about algorithmic bias, which—crucially—may appear in AI accidentally, without any malice by the developers.

All these principles are united in the concept of integral human development. “Development is integral,” Leo says, “when it is not limited to the economic sphere, but promotes quality of life in its spiritual, cultural, moral and relational dimensions, while respecting our common home, the diversity of peoples and their ways of life.” In other words, great abundance in one narrow dimension of life cannot make up for deficits in others. In the Catholic view, the human person is a united whole, not a collection of separate needs and aspirations stuffed into the same body. No amount of food can satisfy someone starving for love, and no amount of love can prevent physical starvation. So the different facets of human fulfillment are not fungible—all must be developed together. The implication is that even if AI gives us material abundance, this does not in itself prevent poverty in domains like political freedom, familial love, and spiritual fulfillment.

The chapter concludes with a somber reflection on the Church’s own failings to live up to these principles over the years. Leo pledges renewed efforts for a humble and accountable Church, “listening to the victims of spiritual, economic, institutional, sexual and power-based abuse, as well as abuses of conscience, [which] is an integral part of a journey toward justice, which includes acknowledging the harm done, just reparation and taking steps to prevent it from happening again.”

Chapter Three

Chapter Three begins the heart of the encyclical’s engagement with the implications of AI. Pope Leo starts by returning to the tower-and-city analogy from the Introduction: “On the one hand, there is the Tower of Babel, where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and ultimately dehumanizes (cf. Gen 11:1-9). On the other hand, there are the ruins of Jerusalem, which under Nehemiah’s direction are rebuilt piece by piece as a project of shared responsibility (cf. Neh 2–6). We are called to reflect on the great ‘construction sites’ of our era and ask: What are we building?”

Leo highlights the dangers of what Pope Francis called the “technocratic paradigm.” This is “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions.” While technology can be a powerful tool for good, “when it 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.” Insofar as AI gives corporations and governments much greater power to optimize the efficiency of economic and policy systems, it risks entrenching this technocratic paradigm and dehumanizing us.

Next, Leo aptly notes that “any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing.” This appears to make him reluctant to engage with risk cases that hinge on technical capabilities, like AI creation of pandemic viruses—instead mostly focusing throughout the encyclical on threats to human dignity that are less dependent on scientific questions about the technology.

Leo then makes an extremely important observation about the nature of deep learning-based AI: “all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’” This is, as I have argued elsewhere, the single most essential fact for everyone on earth to understand about today’s AI. And the vast majority of AI risk flows from that fact—the training process creates models with unintended goals and capabilities that the developers did not intend. Immense credit to Pope Leo for stating this so clearly to a worldwide audience.

In the next passage, Leo insists that AI models “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence,” while acknowledging that this offers “tangible benefits across many fields.” He says—correctly, I think, at least for current technology—that AIs “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” The question of whether more advanced AIs in the future could undergo experiences is not directly addressed, but requires further research. Leo does not preempt that research with a definitive statement, which is wise.

He goes on that AIs “may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce.” This is where things get tricky. Words like “imitate,” “simulate,” and “understand,” mean very different things to different people. I think Pope Leo is correct in the narrow theological sense that he likely intends, but in my experience most people understand those terms in a broader and colloquial sense that may steer them toward inaccurate intuitions about AI’s future. If you tell the average person that AI is incapable of understanding, they’re likely to infer that AI can’t do many kinds of dangerous things that in humans require deep understanding to do. I hope that in future statements, Pope Leo will clarify these terms and their implications to avoid unintentionally downplaying AI risks.

Next, Leo warns that careless AI use “can encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment.” These side effects are certainly not inevitable or universal, but many of us now know someone who has either outsourced key personal decisions to AI or been pushed into “AI psychosis” by sycophantic AI models that flatter them excessively.

Then, he returns to the algorithmic bias issue: “The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them, with all their strengths and limitations.” I would amplify: this doesn’t necessarily entail any direct political skewing of AI whatsoever. Innocent blindspots can just as easily prevent developers from anticipating how AI might fail and cause harm.

That is followed by a warning about AI imitating genuine human connection: “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love—can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject.” Leo makes an important clarification: “Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.” Think of a lonely young man with an AI girlfriend. Yes, he would have preferred a human girlfriend, but finding one entails stress and brutal rejection. If he gets unblinking adoration by an infinitely patient AI free from human complexity, independent desires, or an interior life of her own, he may give up on human romance. And the very habituation to such counterfeit romance will likely make human partnership harder if he ever changes his mind.

The section concludes with a discussion of the environmental impact of AI. Leo does not wade into detailed costs and benefits, but asserts an important principle: the race to build data centers and related infrastructure will naturally tend to harm vulnerable people the most. So we must be very deliberate as a society about protecting them, and must work toward sustainable technologies that preserve our shared home for future generations. Absent here, though I think worthy of mention, is AI’s positive potential to help the environment—such as through materials science breakthroughs for clean energy, through making other processes more resource-efficient, and developing better technologies for carbon capture and pollution cleanup. I would like to see the Church’s future engagement with AI’s environmental implications address the ethics of these positive uses. For example, AI may soon give us powerful geoengineering tools to reverse climate change, but different groups of vulnerable people would face both benefits and harms—who has the moral authority to decide, and under what decisionmaking framework?

Pope Leo next turns to questions around AI governance, transparency, and accountability. He notes, quoting Pope Francis: “Important and sensitive decisions—concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation—risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know ‘compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change.’” That is a very real hazard. But I think this wording risks conflating processes and outcomes. The process question is: was the innocent defendant tried by a jury capable of feeling compassion? The outcome question is: was the innocent defendant actually acquitted? In today’s society, those things are closely intertwined. But although AI is susceptible to inheriting human biases, we already know how to make AI much less biased than humans. Even if AI can’t feel subjective compassion, it may soon be able to make decisions consistent with compassionate reasoning more reliably than the average human. I hope the Church explores this complexity further, reflecting on when human decisionmaking is inherently irreplaceable versus where just outcomes are the foremost priority.

Leo’s next point is excellent: “ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.” For example, if an AI in charge of healthcare decisions treats people with Down syndrome as less worthy of expensive treatments by virtue of shorter nominal life expectancy, Leo teaches that it doesn’t matter that the developers’ goal is to maximize overall lives saved—this is wrong.

He insists that as we deploy AI throughout society, we ensure that a human remains morally and legally accountable for each of its actions. This accountability of decisionmakers to citizens is central to Catholic Social Teaching, and must not be abandoned for convenience or cost savings.

Then comes a headline claim: “Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family.” Questions around AI pauses or slowdowns are complex, and I believe must be evaluated based on concrete scenarios rather than hashtag slogans. But it’s highly significant that Leo is explicitly open to slowing down under some circumstances.

Leo continues with a correct diagnosis: “This need is all the more urgent given the frequent imbalance between the speed of technological growth and the slower development of awareness, norms, safeguards and institutions capable of governing its effects.” He worries that without informed users and robust political oversight, “change will be governed only by technocratic thinking and presented as necessary and inevitable, ultimately imposing rules shaped by those who control data, infrastructure and computing power.”

Now he really gets to the heart of things: “We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines—the so-called ‘alignment’ of AI with human values—without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.” Whether you’re a Democrat horrified by Grok’s unhinged rants against Jews, or a MAGA Republican convinced that ChatGPT’s seeming preference for nuclear war over misgendering reveals leftist extremism, you should agree that a handful of CEOs shouldn’t unilaterally decide which ethical framework dominates humanity’s shared future. To their credit, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all been very clear that AI’s values should ultimately be subject to democratic oversight. Note that Pope Leo isn’t arguing that Sam Altman or Dario Amodei will necessarily pick bad values—he’s saying that even if they pick good values, excluding ordinary people from meaningful participation is inherently bad because it violates their dignity and paternalistically reduces them to “passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere.”

Leo continues that “ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation.” If you pray, pray for collective wisdom around this, because no one has found a good solution yet.

Then another headline statement, more about principles than policy: “In a world where data, computational resources and regulatory influence remain in the hands of a few, to speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI.” These asymmetries are an essential concept. AI companies aren’t selling normal goods like cars or dishwashers, nor normal software like Microsoft Word—they are creating the layer through which we will consume most of our information. Unless we proactively create strong safeguards, some combination of government power and corporate power will use that layer to dominate society and subjugate ordinary people.

Leo follows this with a striking turn of phrase: the need “to disarm” AI. He doesn’t mean this merely in the sense of avoiding AI as a focus of military competition. He speaks more broadly about the “desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.” This has acute relevance to the arms race between the U.S. and China, which could push both sides to disastrously cut corners on safety as they sprint toward broadly superhuman AI. “To disarm,” Leo says, “means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” This is, alas, not an explicit discussion of misalignment or catastrophic risk, but lays clear groundwork for deeper engagement on those topics in the future.

The section concludes with a personal message to AI lab leaders: “I wish to address a special appeal to those who develop artificial intelligence. In one sense, technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation. Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.”

Pope Leo then turns to what’s at stake for our species. The technocratic paradigm, he warns, amplifies an “anti-human vision” in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control.” Further: “When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.” He cautions against AI leading humanity to treat intelligence as an absolute measure of worth, rather than one faculty in service of many others.

Next, Leo turns his attention to two related schools of thought that are extremely common among the people developing advanced AI: transhumanism and posthumanism. In general, these views hold that technology can have profound positive effects on the human condition that go beyond material wealth or mere convenience and amount to a more fundamental evolution of our species. To his credit, Leo acknowledges that these terms encompass an extraordinarily wide range of views—some of which, I think are quite compatible with Christianity and some of which are clearly not—and he refrains from the blanket condemnation that some other Popes might have made.

Instead, he focuses on “not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it.” Namely: “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.”

Leo’s test for thinking about transhumanism: “It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’”

He turns to a common worldview today: “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’—incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability—tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” Yet Leo does not reject efforts to overcome limitations, as long as this doesn’t turn us away from God as the ultimate source of transcendence: “While it is right to strive to alleviate the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude.” This is one of the key tensions at the heart of the encyclical: Catholic Social Teaching calls us to alleviate suffering, and AI will give us enormous power to do so, but doing this carelessly risks costing us the very humanity we are trying to protect.

Leo teaches that the experience of limitations helps us develop compassion for and solidarity with our fellow humans: “Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.”

In contrast to many pessimistic visions of human morality, Leo points to concrete signs of shared moral progress: the abolition of slavery, the establishment of the Red Cross, the founding of the United Nations and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1951 Refugee Convention. Yes, these are far from perfect, and “[m]oral progress almost always unfolds through a long and demanding journey, often marked by setbacks.” But Leo is moved by a profound hope in humanity’s ability to rise to the challenges of AI.

This returns to a reflection on wisely harnessing the transformative potential of AI: “humanity—in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed. We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.” Ultimately, Leo argues, “what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.”

A more ambiguous passage follows: “a technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can, however unintentionally, become an obstacle to change and growth. For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.” I can certainly imagine senses in which this is true, but it seems to embed a claim—perhaps unintended—that AI cannot have genuinely creative powers. And that risks implying that AI could never have the profound real-world impacts that in humans take genuinely creative powers.

The chapter closes with a return to the tower versus the city as a longstanding tension throughout history: “The age of AI is no exception: the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us.”

Chapter Four

Chapter Four focuses on safeguarding humanity amidst transformations to the spheres of truth, work, and freedom. Pope Leo begins by considering the essential relationship between truth and democracy.

To understand his concern, we should start with important context. Catholic Social Teaching urges citizens to “take an active role in public life,” but emphasizes each person’s duty to cultivate a “well-formed conscience” to guide this. It’s hard to do that if you’re guzzling algorithmically-targeted ragebait and misinformation from morning to night. As the U.S. Catholic bishops have stressed, having good moral values is not enough. “It is also important,” they said, “to examine the facts and background information” of specific situations. That is, our moral obligations around public life—who to vote for, whether to protest, whether to disobey an unjust law—often depend on factual realities of what’s happening in our community. For example, if police shoot a man to death, the correct moral stance hinges tremendously on whether he was about to murder a child or was a peaceful protester. There’s an objective truth to that question, but we can’t find it in the Bible or the Catechism. We have to carefully discern among fallible information sources.

That’s hard even in the best of times. As Vatican II put it: “Great care must be taken about civic and political formation, which is of the utmost necessity today for the population as a whole, and especially for youth, so that all citizens can play their part in the life of the political community.” If that formation consists of the parents in their bed scrolling Facebook watching pro-Trump ragebait, and the kids in their beds scrolling TikTok watching anti-Trump ragebait, the life of the political community is going to go down in flames.

Pope Leo thus recognizes AI as a “powerful amplifier” of the disinformation that thwarts healthy political formation and threatens to tear us apart. The hard work of discerning truth, he says, “it is deeply relational, built through bonds of trust and shared practices.” This means that algorithms that maximize engagement by turning citizens against each other with anger and fear directly undermine democracy.

“After all,” Leo says, “democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole. Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather ‘people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.’” These words are written for all people of good will, but few will miss that they have special relevance to the political situation in the United States.

“Truth,” Leo continues, “is a common good.” Just as releasing poisonous lead into the atmosphere robs people of clean air as a shared inheritance, spreading deepfakes online robs people of a healthy information environment in which to discern truth.

Truth is essential even and especially when it reveals failings by the Church itself. Leo echoes the words of Pope Francis in addressing journalists: “I also thank you for what you tell us about what goes wrong in the Church, for helping us not to sweep it under the carpet, and for the voice you have given to the victims of abuse.”

Leo turns, then, to the need for education that avoids letting the quick answers of AI dull our patience and persistence in seeking understanding. He notes the growing body of research in psychology and psychiatry that ties excessive or irresponsible use of digital technologies to mental health problems, especially for the young. This is exacerbated by youth’s online exposure to violent, degrading, or pornographic content, and the prevalence of sexual grooming, blackmail, and cyberbullying. Notably absent from this discussion is what I would argue is an even greater social threat today: online radicalization of young men. AI algorithms are supercharging the influence of “manosphere” and “incel” influencers who preach hate against women—and often also against people who are gay, Jewish, Black, Muslim, or transgender. In many cases, these extremists are professed Catholics, and are turning millions of young men away from the Gospel with fantasies of crusade and violent revolution. I suspect the Vatican underestimates the threat, and Pope Leo may have been advised not to elevate these extremists by condemning them. But I doubt ignoring them will work, and I hope he will eventually address this online radicalization head-on.

Leo identifies schools as having a special purpose in preserving and promoting truth as a common good, and calls for an intersectoral alliance to strengthen schools for the AI future. “Schools,” he says, “are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”

From there, Pope Leo turns to the value of work. Through work, he says, we “contribute to the progress of society and the common good, put to good use the capabilities we have received, improve and beautify the world, support our families, engage in cooperative relationships and, through listening and dialogue, learn to build together something that no one could achieve alone.”

Work, Leo says, “is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment. In this regard, financial assistance to the poor may at times be necessary in emergencies, but it cannot become the sole response, since the goal is to enable each person to live with dignity through his or her own work.” This places Pope Leo currently in opposition to proposals like universal basic income—and at least implies a rejection of a future where economic work is largely automated. What’s not clear is whether he has considered these radical scenarios in detail, or is speaking here primarily of work in roughly its current technological context. My best guess is the latter.

Some evidence on this question comes in the following paragraph, where Leo warns that AI “can paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks.” Automated surveillance is indeed a serious problem. AI has allowed McKinsey-style productivity analysis to metastasize into highly intrusive tracking of bathroom breaks, walking speed, and mouseclicks—to the point of dehumanizing and demoralizing workers. But the upcoming wave of automation is shifting sharply away from de-skilling toward replacing human work altogether. The more forward-looking concern is that many people will lose jobs outright and not be able to find suitable new ones.

Pope Leo expresses a position that welcomes technology able to “relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity.” But he insists that “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule. The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The coming years will introduce a difficult complication to this picture. In a growing number of spheres, AI won’t just be cheaper than human workers, but better and safer. For example, over 2 million Americans have jobs driving large trucks. But every year, large truck crashes cause over 5,000 fatalities in the U.S. alone. Often because the driver was drunk, drowsy, or distracted. Even today’s self-driving AI would prevent the vast majority of these deaths. Should we block this life-saving technology to protect those employment opportunities? Or are there better ways of preserving truckers’ dignity and livelihood without burying thousands of our friends and neighbors annually? I hope Leo’s future teachings on automation explore those challenging tradeoffs more deeply.

Next comes a vital imperative: “At this time of transition, it is not enough to react only when jobs disappear; we must oversee the transformation in advance.” This is essential. Yet I fear Pope Leo’s calls for policies for “retraining” and “continuous training and professional transitions,” will prove overoptimistic. Dreams of retraining often reflect shortcomings of the very technocratic mindset that Leo critiques. Harvard professors and McKinsey consultants like to imagine that a 55-year-old man laid off from a Detroit assembly line can simply reskill as a male nurse and find work caring for retirees in Arizona. But this neglects the human realities of family and community. Even if nursing is a fit for him, can we really ask him to sever his entire support system of friends, and leave behind his aging mother and the grave of his father, all to spare us the inconvenience of deeper solutions for Detroit? Humans, as Pope Leo deeply understands, cannot be moved that way like chess pieces. In any case, the rate at which AI is gaining the ability to automate more jobs is already starting to surpass the rate at which humans can retrain for new occupations. Without a fundamental rethink of what we compensate as work and how, market forces will prove retraining deeply insufficient.

After that, Leo makes a very needed call to move beyond GDP as the primary metric of development. GDP measures total economic activity, but fails to consider distribution—it considers $1,000,000,000,001 to Elon Musk better than $10,000 to each of the neediest 100 million Americans. GDP also misses factors like happiness, education, justice, peace, and the environment. Further, even in narrowly economic terms, GDP is getting worse and worse at measuring what we care about. Google only shows up in GDP as the ads it sells—not the valuable knowledge it lets billions of people access for free. Wikipedia—the greatest nonprofit information project in history—is virtually invisible to GDP. As Leo teaches, we cannot discern wise policies if we cannot measure them in terms of metrics that validly reflect integral human development.

Turning to freedom, Pope Leo then addresses the “subtler forms of addiction linked to the ‘digital attention economy’” and calls out the means by which social media, mediated by AI algorithms, “is exploiting [users’] vulnerabilities and weakening their inner freedom. He aims criticism squarely at tech company leaders: “When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end; those who design or finance such systems bear a moral responsibility that cannot be ignored.”

From there, he warns of the “social control made possible by the massive collection of data and use of algorithmic systems.” Leo continues: “When every action—movements, purchases, relationships and preferences—leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it.” Although not explicit here, this concern applies especially to near-future AI enabling mass domestic surveillance. When you scroll quickly through terms and conditions for a new smartphone, you’re agreeing to anonymized tracking. Your phone constantly pings out its location, which is harvested to form a pattern of your movements—no problem, tech companies insist, because your name isn’t attached. But your “anonymized” phone always sits on the same nightstand at 2:00 AM, and if the government uses AI to combine that data with a property records database, it can easily identify you and figure out which political protest you attended, or that you went to a gay bar, or got treated at a gender clinic. Without vigorous public pushback, this will give governments a terrifying new power that even the Stasi in East Germany couldn’t have dreamed of.

Leo then turns to AI’s relation to economic exploitation. He reminds us: “Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical.” Rather, its wondrous performance often draws on training feedback or data labeling by people in the developing world working for little money, sometimes in traumatizing conditions. In addition, the physical infrastructure stack of chips and batteries still often relies on rare earth elements extracted under harsh conditions, sometimes by children. For a technology that promises newfound freedom and prosperity, it is imperative that its controllers demand higher standards of human dignity throughout its supply chain.

Pope Leo explicitly likens moral apathy toward economic exploitation to the historical toleration of slavery. He expresses profound regret for “the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.” He personally begs forgiveness on behalf of the whole faith: “This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

This is not just historical sorrow, but a warning for the future: “the memory of past complicity and blindness in the face of the injustice of slavery becomes a call to vigilance. What we have learned must be translated into discernment and responsibility in the present. If we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith, it falls to us today” to work actively to combat human trafficking and similar forms of exploitation. The alternative could be a digital form of colonialism where injustice against the vulnerable enriches the powerful. “Without this ethical and humanizing reflection,” he says, “the growing power of digital systems could lead us toward new atrocities that are no less shameful than those of the past that we now deplore, while we continue to present ourselves as ‘advanced’ and ‘civilized’ societies.”

Chapter Five

Chapter Five addresses “the culture of power and the civilization of love.” Here, Pope Leo observes a recent worsening of the might-makes-right logic of international affairs that had seemed to be receding. He contrasts this sad reality with the aspiration to a new international order grounded in human compassion and true solidarity among peoples.

As the culture of power gains sway, he sees a danger that AI advances will make warfare even more attractive. “While AI can enhance the defense and protection of civilians,” he says, “it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to ‘collateral damage.’”

Further, AI is directly tightening the bonds “linking—in real time—decisions made in one place to the effects they produce elsewhere.” It appears Leo is mainly focusing here on economic effects and conventional warfare. But this logic applies even more to catastrophic risk. An AI lab in San Francisco or Beijing might create an AI that goes rogue and creates a pandemic virus that kills millions in Jakarta or Nairobi. If superintelligent AI goes wrong, nowhere on earth is safe. Christians and atheists, young and old, rich and poor, our futures are inescapably intertwined.

Leo notes that as autonomous weapons make war “more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control,” leaders will be tempted to “violate[] the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense.”

Then comes a more fraught claim: “Sometimes there is talk of ‘artificial moral agents,’ as if machines were able to distinguish between right and wrong with greater consistency than a human being… it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.” This is another case where I sense the theological language conflates processes and outcomes. Yes, in humans wartime discernment of right and wrong involves a subjective mental process that it appears AI does not have—the lived experience of pondering whether to kill a child holding a gun. But there’s also an empirical question: did you or did you not kill the child that was in fact just harmlessly examining the gun? And even if AI has no moral discernment in the subjective, theological sense, it is very plausible that a system that’s memorized every human moral text and is able to think hundreds of times faster than a human would indeed choose the right moral outcome in wartime with greater consistency than a human. After all, a look at history shows a long and dismal catalogue of human failures to distinguish between right and wrong. Eventually, there will be tension between a blanket ban on lethal autonomous weapons and the Church’s concern for alleviating objective suffering. I hope the Church engages with the nuanced question of what principles can minimize actual harm to innocents while preserving ultimate human moral responsibility for uses of force.

A key implication of Pope Leo’s teaching here is that human conscience is a significant bulwark against unjust war and domestic repression. This is a meaningful constraint even on authoritarian regimes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine was hiding from American warships, cut off from contact with Moscow, and the captain decided to strike the Americans with a nuclear torpedo. This would have started World War III. The order had to be approved by all three senior officers aboard, and one—Vasily Arkhipov—refused and thereby saved the world. In today’s world, if Xi Jinping woke up tomorrow and decided out of the blue to annihilate Japan with nuclear weapons, that order would have to pass through numerous subordinates. Likely someone would think of the children—the immediate victims and their own—and refuse long enough for Xi to be deposed or sedated. And the reason color revolutions so often work against strongmen like Viktor Yanukovych is that in desperation they order their troops to kill protesters. Their generals and police captains look into the crowds, and know their own friends and their own children might be out there. They refuse, and the regime collapses. These dynamics are hardly perfect and sometimes fail, but civilization would have already literally ended without them.

But what happens when national leaders have swarms of killer drones and armies of algorithmically loyal robotic soldiers? Then, even the most unjust orders will not be refused. And some prominent thinkers explicitly advocate such a world. Curtis Yarvin is a far-right political philosopher read with appreciation by Vice President Vance and numerous senior Trump administration officials. Yarvin believes that the United States should be ruled by a dictator who runs the country like a CEO and ruthlessly crushes dissent. In a 2021 essay titled “Monarchism and Fascism Today,” he argued that converting the military to unquestioning AI and robots would make America’s dictator immune to military coups. Also implied: when workers are replaced by robots, humans withdrawing their labor from the ruler through national general strikes—historically a last defense against tyranny—would be useless.

In explaining the sickness in our international relations, Pope Leo diagnoses that “[a]t the core of these issues is a false realism, based not only on the prevailing mentality of force, but on the cultural and anthropological belief that war is an inevitable part of human nature.” This is so pervasive that experts speaking seriously about the global renunciation of war are laughed out of the room or dismissed as foolish and irresponsible. “I would argue, however,” Leo counters, “that what is truly irresponsible is Realpolitik, the form of political ‘realism’ that sows in consciences and in society an attitude of resignation to the inevitability of war, and dismisses peace and dialogue as utopian or irrational positions that ignore the risks at stake.”

Another observation sure to ruffle feathers in the White House and the Kremlin: “In countries marked by serious social tensions, we cannot rule out the possibility that some leaders may consider armed conflict as an effective way of diverting attention from domestic problems and a cynical tool for managing difficulties.”

Echoing the Postwar concerns of Manhattan Project scientists, Pope Leo warns AI scientists and lab leaders against a narrow focus on their technology that obscures the morality of its use. He enjoins them to maintain “an acute awareness of the broader context of the technological advancements they help to cultivate… When people limit themselves to looking only at their own sector, they may deceive themselves into believing they are performing actions that are morally neutral and avoid questions about the ultimate ends that guide certain experiments.” Leo continues: “In this way, they risk cooperating—perhaps unknowingly—with questionable projects that fuel new forms of violence, manipulation and dominance.” Although he focuses here on sub-catastrophic harms, the same logic applies to existential calamities. Heedless pursuit of multitrillion-dollar profits, forgoing appropriate technical precautions, could inadvertently create rogue superintelligent AI that wipes out humanity itself.

All this could lead to a belief that these lab leaders hold mankind’s entire fate in their hands, leaving most of us with no agency over the future. But Leo gently urges against despair and disengagement: “a subtle temptation may emerge, namely the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices, therefore, cannot make a difference. This is a polite form of resignation, often disguised as realism.”

Leo concedes that “not everyone has the same power to make a difference. There are those who govern, make investment decisions, lead institutions, conduct research, educate, produce or provide information, and then there are those who only seem to live their daily lives.” He is not offering a fantasy. “Yet, no one is without responsibility,” he insists. “We all have our own areas for action, and it is precisely there—and nowhere else—that we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force (even if only through indifference, cynicism, lies or hatred), or to preserve the mindset of peace (with truth, moderation, closeness and care).”

In a passage sure to delight many readers, Leo quotes Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” And so, Leo says, “The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.”

He then proposes “five paths toward daily and public responsibility: the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.”

Disarming words means to “examine our conscience regarding the words we use, the prejudices we have and the explicit or implicit aggression that lies within them. We have a real opportunity to contribute to the common good each time we speak the truth, offer wise advice, support those in need of comfort, denounce injustice and give a voice to the voiceless.” In the AI age, our words take on heightened significance, because their impact can be literally global. If you say something hateful in your neighborhood bar, a few drunk people will hear it and forget by the next morning. If you say something hateful on TikTok, if it catches the algorithm just right, you can go to sleep and wake up the next morning and 3 million people have seen it. If even one in a million are incited to beat up someone in the target group, that’s three hate crimes you’ve carelessly caused. Leo powerfully reverses this logic. Just as hateful words have greater impact than ever, disarming the hate from our words can be more transformative than ever.

Turning to the morality of war itself, Leo says: “In some conflicts, it is unjust to remain neutral, nor is it enough merely to claim that we are not complicit. When we witness the bombing of civilians, attacks on hospitals, schools or vital infrastructure, and violence that affects children, we are confronted with scandals that wound humanity itself.” He invokes Pope Francis’s call to “touch the wounded flesh” of suffering people and maintain the history and memory of painful events.

But moral witness must be tied to concretely effective action in order to build a just peace. A proper response to the culture of power, he says, is “a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism.” Building a civilization of love requires “an attitude that seeks to forge bonds of fraternity built on listening, an open demeanor, making time for each other and even wasting time together. For if we experience authentic encounters with others, with those who are different, strangers and migrants, it becomes much more difficult even to imagine war.”

“Cyberspace too has become a battleground,” Leo says. “For this reason, diplomacy must be capable of operating effectively in this new environment, negotiating shared regulations on the use of digital technologies, in order to protect civilians and the most vulnerable from ‘invisible’ yet real forms of violence.”

Conclusion

The Conclusion powerfully teaches that “the gift of peace enters into the world in a paradoxical way. It does so through the power to become children of God, and is awakened when we allow ourselves to be moved by the tears of the little ones, the fragility of the elderly, the silence of victims and the struggle of those who fight against the evil they do not wish to commit.” A memorable summation: “Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.”

As argued previously, the people who control social media platforms bear significant responsibility for our present sickness. But Pope Leo does not let any of us off the hook. He clearly recognizes the important truth that the algorithms reflect our own vices back to us. When we give in to our wrathful impulses, we see even more ragebait that stokes them further. When we favor quick dopamine over human connection, we’re pushed deeper into isolation. When we lap up flattering lies, the truth gets pushed off our newsfeed by propaganda. And crucially, indulging all these vices not only harms ourselves, but spreads them like a literal virus to our friends and loved ones. So we all have a share in resisting manipulative algorithms, Leo says: “it is imperative to cultivate hearts that love the truth, prefer what is right despite the most appealing content and pursue wisdom rather than immediate results.”

He addresses parents and educators: “Teaching new generations that technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility, constitutes one of the most valuable services to the common good.”

A deeply humane and practical exhortation: “Let us cultivate relationships! In an era that favors speed and fragmentation, the human person still yearns to receive care and recognition from attentive minds, kind words and hands capable of tenderness.” And another: “I invite everyone to cherish places and times where physical presence remains crucial, such as shared meals, Christian community gatherings, time spent with the lonely and serving the poor.”

Leo returns to the “covenant between glory and fragility” inherent in humanity that should be our criterion for judging visions for the future of AI. Visions grounded in a recognition of both our infinite dignity and our profound brokenness lead us toward fulfillment. Those that aren’t do not.

The Holy Father concludes with an invitation to action: “let us become ‘weavers of hope’ in our world, sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape. In the humble fidelity of daily life, even the era of AI can become a time in which the Holy Spirit brings about the civilization of love in our lives.”