Pope Leo XIV Issues His First Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence

Leo XIV invites the reader to choose: are people building the Tower of Babel, or restoring Jerusalem under Nehemiah? The main thing the Pope draws attention to in the encyclical is the passage of technological power from the public sector to the private, as though this had only just happened.

I think the very framing of the question absurd. Naturally, what we are watching today is the opening act of the myth of the Tower of Babel.

But what I liked was the statement on transhumanism and posthumanism as narratives against which our understanding of the human being must be defended. Most important of all, the pontiff began this serious conversation about technology precisely from the standpoint of anthropological observation, and touched on all the acute problems without alarmism: from war waged with the aid of AI and power without limits to patents, algorithms and data as a new form of property, to which the principle of the universal destination of goods should apply.