The pope’s AI encyclical isn’t really about AI

Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical connected Monday, dubbed Magnifica Humanitas, on “safeguarding the quality idiosyncratic successful the clip of artificial intelligence.” And portion AI is the hook, the problems Leo focuses connected are older and much pervasive: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and the attraction of powerfulness successful the hands of those who don’t needfully attraction whether humanity writ ample remains magnificent.

Throughout the 200-page document, which the pope presented alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, Leo argues that exertion built and governed by a tiny elite cannot, by definition, service the communal good. 

“When specified powerfulness is concentrated successful the hands of a few, it tends to go opaque and evade nationalist oversight, expanding the hazard of distorted forms of improvement that springiness emergence to caller dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities,” helium writes. 

“In fact, arsenic with each large technological shift, AI tends to amplify the powerfulness of those who already person economical resources, expertise and entree to data,” the encyclical continues, highlighting concerns that elites tin usage their powerfulness to “shape accusation and depletion patterns, power antiauthoritarian processes and steer economical dynamics to their ain advantage.”

The encyclical comes a fewer days aft President Donald Trump delayed signing his enforcement bid connected AI, which would person fixed the authorities oversight implicit caller models earlier they are released, reportedly connected the urging of VC capitalist and erstwhile White House AI czar David Sacks.

Pope Leo called for AI to beryllium guided by “clear criteria and effectual oversight” grounded successful information from communities that volition beryllium affected by it. More concretely, Leo called for an extremity to the AI arms contention “for ever much almighty algorithms and larger datasets” that companies and countries judge volition “secure geopolitical oregon commercialized dominance.”

“To disarm means discrediting the presumption that method powerfulness automatically confers the close to govern,” helium wrote.

Again, these dynamics predate AI. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum addressed the aforesaid attraction of powerfulness during the Industrial Revolution, but we needn’t look backmost that far. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and deployment of the level to assistance elite Trump; the hundreds of millions flowing from tech elites into ace PACs to artifact AI regularisation — the benignant of signifier that intelligibly inspired Leo XIV’s work.

The pope comes to the aforesaid decision that galore person arrived at: the surreal powerfulness and capabilities of today’s AI rise the stakes enormously. 

Notre Dame Law School prof Paolo Carozza, a subordinate of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and seat of the Meta Oversight Board, told TechCrunch that AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes person “corroded our capableness to admit what’s existent and what’s not true, and that truly has consequences for antiauthoritarian politics.” The tech industry’s signifier of “harvesting and manipulating” quality data, helium added, poses “fundamental challenges to cognitive freedom.”