Yuval Levin responds to the pope’s major statement about the impact of artificial intelligence.
Since the beginning of his papacy a year ago, Pope Leo XIV has held out the promise of offering the world some much-needed wisdom on living well with technology. His very choice of name hearkened back to Leo XIII’s unmatched moral and intellectual leadership in framing the case for human flourishing in the face of the indignities of the industrial age. And his ambition has seemed directed to offering similar guidance, rooted in the same enduring conception of the nature of the human person, to a world coming to terms with artificial intelligence.
His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, released to the world this past Monday, certainly reflects that ambition. But it also reflects the difficulties posed by the sheer magnitude of the moment. Comparing AI to capitalism is no flight of hyperbole. In its scope and consequences, the era of change now dawning could well be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution. And it is much too soon to hope to get our arms and heads around its implications.
This is one unavoidable conclusion from reading Magnifica Humanitas. Leo XIII did not offer his guidance at the dawn of the industrial age. He thought and wrote near the end of the nineteenth century, when the character of industrial capitalism had become readily evident, and the nature of the benefits it offered and the challenges it posed could be articulated and classified. Leo XIV does not have that advantage. He is, like the rest of us, straining to grasp the contours of the still-emerging age of AI. …
… I’m blessed and burdened with the maddening equanimity of middle age: I’m pretty sure the world did not begin yesterday and will not end tomorrow, so I think all of you should calm down.
This should all render me a very friendly reader of Magnifica Humanitas, and I left the document immensely impressed with its author. But ultimately, the encyclical strikes me as a missed opportunity, and even as a failure to grapple with the scope of what awaits us in the coming years.
