AI Before the Human Person

Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence warns about opaque digital power, technological concentration and the need to disarm the logic of domination over human life.

AI Before the Judgment of the Human Person

Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence warns about the opaque power of platforms, technological concentration and the need to disarm the logic of domination over the human person.
“Magnifica Humanitas”, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”, is the first document of its kind issued by the current Pope.
A more than suggestive title, which already warns of the need to safeguard the human being in the face of the overwhelming spread of AI.
Encyclicals are usually addressed: “To the venerable brothers patriarchs, primates, archbishops, bishops and other local ordinaries who are at peace and in communion with the Apostolic See, and to all the faithful of the Catholic world”.
But in this case that formula has been omitted, which indicates that the letter is addressed to all people, literally “urbi et orbi”.
Chapter III, “Technique and Dominion. The Greatness of the Human Person Before the Promises of AI”, is what we will devote this note to.
And we will do so using the document’s own words, whose clarity, it seems to us, requires little further comment.
The validity of a “technocratic paradigm in the globalized world” is well known: the tendency to allow the logic of efficiency, control and profit to govern personal, social and economic decisions by itself.
This tendency has “spread rapidly in recent years, also as a result of the diffusion of AI, cognitive sciences, nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology”.
These technologies “need a new spiritual, ethical and political framework”.
Because “technical progress, valuable in itself, requires discernment regarding the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues”.
It must be kept very much in mind that “control over platforms, infrastructures, data and computing capacity is not the prerogative of States, but of large economic and technological actors that, in practice, determine the conditions of access, the rules of visibility and the very possibilities of participation. When power of such magnitude is concentrated in few hands, it tends to become opaque”.
And in that opacity there fades “the inalienable dignity of the person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice. These principles require us to verify whether the power of digital infrastructures and algorithms truly favors participation and responsibility, protects the most vulnerable, ensures equitable access to opportunities and is ordered to the good of all”.
It must be especially borne in mind that “any statement about AI risks becoming obsolete in a short time, given the impressive speed of development of these systems. Secondly, all of us, including those who design them, know very little about their actual functioning”.
AI processes faster than the human brain; “however, this power remains linked exclusively to the processing of data: so-called artificial intelligences do not live an experience, do not possess a body, do not pass through joy and pain, do not mature in relationships, nor do they know from within what love, work, friendship and responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience: they do not judge good and evil, do not grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, nor do they assume the weight of consequences”.
Moreover, they generate “the false impression of being in a relationship with an authentic personal subject”.
As if these objections were not enough, “Current AI systems require large amounts of energy and water, have a significant impact on carbon dioxide emissions and consume resources intensively. As complexity increases, especially in large language models, so do the needs for computing power and storage capacity, which rely on a set of machines, cables, data centers and energy-consuming infrastructures. That is why it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions to reduce the impact on the environment and care for our common home”.
Warning about these things “does not mean being against progress, but exercising responsible care toward the human family”.
That is why “adequate legal frameworks, independent oversight, user education and a politics that does not renounce its task are needed. Otherwise, change will be governed only by technocratic logics and presented as necessary and unavoidable”.
Thus, “whoever controls AI will impose his own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of the systems. A more moral AI would be of no use if that morality is decided by a few”.
Those “small but highly influential groups can guide information and consumption, condition democratic processes and affect economic dynamics for their own benefit, contradicting social justice and solidarity among peoples”.
“I would like, finally, to use a word that is very important to me: ‘disarm’.”
To disarm AI means to remove it from the logic of an arms race, which today is no longer only military, but also economic and cognitive. It is the race for the most effective algorithm and the largest database, in order to consolidate a geopolitical or commercial advantage over all others. To disarm does not mean renouncing technology, but preventing it from dominating the human. It means removing it from monopolies, making it discussable, refutable and therefore habitable, restoring within it the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.
If in an “ecosystem, harmony is broken when a single species proliferates to the detriment of the others; in the human realm, the same occurs when one faculty claims to be the measure of everything. Thus, intelligence, if absolutized, ends up veiling other essential dimensions of life: affection, will, self-giving and relationship. Technical power, if not balanced, does not make us more capable; it isolates us and exposes us even more to logics of domination and exclusion. It is certainly not a matter of opposing intelligence, but of remembering that, when it folds back upon itself, it forgets that it was made to serve life and the human person”.

AI and human dignity.
Technological power and opacity.
Disarming the logic of domination.

Continue reading in Global Order and Geopolitics