Does the pope have an editor? If I could presume to undertake this task for a second, then I could have one small letter of Leo XIV after reading his new one. encyclical about artificial intelligence: Good stuff, but lose the Tower of Babel. They are tired words. Many of us have already been told that those who would seek to be like God will see their desires fall to the ground. And in this example, the subject has a small audience. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other tower builders should have a picture of the tower tattooed on their chest. But the rest of us, who often suffer from these godlike people and their expectations, are just trying to get through our days.
Fortunately, today’s letter, Amazing humanity (or “Good Humanity”), is more than a slap at Silicon Valley. Pope does two very important things in his document: He identifies the threat of AI as a form of personality, and then he claims, with passion and open eyes, what it really is. saving value about being human. This second part of the argument is often left out—or left out—when people talk about it the threat of AI. Many people feel comfortable with technology that seems to squeeze some aspects of feeling important, such as thinking out of our lives, but then don’t spend too much time trying to explain what is being lost.
The ideology of Silicon Valley is one of inevitability: History is moving, with a Hegelian determination, in one direction – towards super-intelligent machines – and anyone who questions or worries about what this means is made to feel like they are waving their hands on the track of a freight train. I have had many conversations with converts that end with, Well, it’s coming, so you better get used to it. What Leo is doing is pushing back against the inevitable.
He chose to release his encyclical on the anniversary of a which preceded Pope Leo’s treatisein 1891, which looked at the ways in which industrialization was flattening humanity. The current pope clearly wants to make the connection between various forms of abuse, based on more than a century of new evidence, with AI being just the latest attacker. These analogies, comparing the heavy weight of factory work or the brutal brutality of Silicon Valley’s manual labor, may seem pessimistic (and even a little exaggerated by some). But today’s thing is that people have always found ways to resist. They have defended laws to protect workers, they have demanded human and civil rights laws, elected not to surrender. He argues against negligence. “Many people are watching and waiting, watching from afar and just hoping for the best,” the pope writes. But the things he describes demand more. He lists the questions that “can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? What goal do we want to direct ourselves towards? What direction should we choose as people and human society?”
First, he suggests, we need to understand what it means to be human, to know what we stand for. I wondered if the pope would give anything more than the simple Christian answer that God’s presence resides in all of us. This would seem to make the case straightforward. If each of us is a reflection of the true nature of divinity, then it seems clear why we should care to preserve what is small and invincible and slow about us. Despite that weakness, God is in us, and therefore we should not pollute something that has that spark. We should protect our mistakes because they are part of an infallible order.
This is part of Leo’s argument, of course—he is, after all, the head of the Catholic Church—but he also makes it clear that humanity, as he describes it, should be exalted because of its “wounds” as much as its “glory.” Our imperfections are the key to understanding what makes humans special. “We must remember that humanity does not thrive in spite of limitations, but often through he writes.” You don’t even need to believe in God to understand that our uniqueness comes from the friction caused by our “weakness, suffering and failure”. To resolve this severity would be to remove what is most important about us. Along those lines, this is probably my favorite passage from the document:
To eliminate suffering altogether would mean, in the end, to extinguish love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid going through trials and tribulations; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark as scars, memories of a journey carved by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interaction of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to feel the richness of our humanity. To abandon this event, sad and beautiful, in the name of supposed transcendence, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.
I’m not a Christian, and really not a believer at all, but this pretty much sums up what I feel AI is taking from us. What makes human life worthwhile is the struggle. The things we earn, love, give and receive to family and community—all involve effort. What AI aims to do is remove the struggle and effort. You could argue, and many do, that it will improve our lives in many ways—if it gets new life-saving drugs faster, for example. But the pope’s point is that it is not more than a few people have control over how and where to use AI. And they let the value of efficiency trump everything else. Humiliation is next. And the only way to resist it is by raising our boundaries, in our struggle, as a good thing.
I will prefer to read a novel written by a human being precisely because I know the limitations imposed on the human brain. An opportunity to communicate with such a brain, which has pushed against those limits to create Middle Marchit accomplishes a thousand times more reading than what the limitless machine has produced. The same can be said for any other part of life—dating, traveling, working—where that friction creates meaning. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected,” Leo writes; “For someone, however, a mistake can be a catalyst for great change.”
Does it take the pope to say this? Of course not. But it is important that he did it. People think of him as a moral tyrant for political leaders who are full of promise but lack direction. What I took from Leo’s words though had nothing to do with good and evil or the state of my soul or the likeness of Christ. I thought about the beauty movement, which is the closest I have faith. What I value most about being human is the infinite ways we have to make meaning for ourselves. This could be the culture we create or the cities we build or the stories we tell our children at night. It’s all a result of dealing with our human condition and what we have. If that disappears, if instead machines, which have never put any effort into anything, are the ones that sustain our world, what will happen to beauty? (The pope, in particular, could not resist mentioning some secular art that was meaningful to him: “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as defamation; Schindler’s List as a call not to forget the past.”)
In addition to the Tower of Babel, Leo mentions another biblical stone in his letter. As its editor, I would save this. It is from the Book of Nehemiah. In it, the prophet decides to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, which were destroyed by the Babylonians. The Pope calls the fact that the construction was a group effort, a human effort. I read the episode, and it’s basically a complete list of technicians and famous families and priests who all help. No magic, no divine involvement, really—just lots of people sweating along with moving rocks. How satisfying it must have been to complete the task, knowing they did it themselves. “So we built a wall,” Nehemiah writes. “Because people had the mind to work.”
