Translation result
[Digital Today AI Reporter] In his first encyclical on artificial intelligence (AI), Pope Leo XIV warned that AI could concentrate power and create the potential for mass unemployment.
On May 25 (local time), Business Insider reported that the pope framed expanding Big Tech influence, labor-market disruption, and developers’ ethical responsibilities as central concerns in the document.
The encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Protecting Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, spans 245 paragraphs. An encyclical is the pope’s formal statement on social and moral issues. Pope Leo XIV stopped short of labeling AI inherently evil, but he cautioned that the ways societies deploy it can impose serious strains on human dignity and social order.
His first focus was the concentration of AI power in the hands of a few. While he did not name companies, he warned that major economic and technology actors are increasingly controlling platforms, infrastructure, data, and computing capacity.
He argued that when such power is concentrated, opacity increases, public oversight weakens, and new forms of dependency, exclusion, manipulation, and inequality can spread.
Drawing on the Catholic principle of the universal destination of goods—traditionally applied to resources like air and water—he said algorithms, digital platforms, and data should be treated as shared social goods. A small group of influential actors, he warned, could use AI to undermine democratic processes and shape economic systems to their advantage.
To respond, he called for what he described as a \”disarmament\” of competition-driven AI development—removing technology from monopolistic control and subjecting it to public debate and social scrutiny.
He also addressed developers directly, stressing that AI creators bear particular ethical and spiritual responsibilities. Every design choice, he wrote, reflects value judgments about how we define and regard human beings.
He urged developers to bake transparency and accountability into their systems and to evaluate whether their technologies genuinely serve the common good. He cautioned against treating AI as fully neutral or objective, noting that it can reflect and amplify developers’ biases.
Employment formed another central pillar of the encyclical. He warned that AI-driven mass unemployment could become a genuine social catastrophe. While concerns about labor-market disruption have followed the rise of generative AI, not all companies or market participants regard the threat equally. Still, Pope Leo XIV set clear principles: AI may make work safer and more efficient, but protecting job opportunities and preserving roles that humans uniquely fulfill must remain fundamental.
He insisted that companies cannot justify job cuts solely to boost profits and warned that AI-driven mass layoffs could cause human and cultural impoverishment.
He urged governments and firms to adopt proactive, not reactive, policies: verifiable measures to protect workers’ employment, provide retraining, and ensure worker participation during automation and AI adoption. He added that AI should extend human time and capacity, not exclude people.
The Vatican said it consulted industry figures before releasing the encyclical, and Chris Olah, Anthropic’s co-founder, reportedly spoke in Vatican City after the document’s release. The pope invited him to listen, engage, and work toward solutions for humanity in the AI era.
Although the encyclical revisits longstanding worries—autonomous weapons, environmental burdens, and the weakening of human relationships—its core argument is that control over AI and its social costs can no longer be treated as an internal matter for tech companies alone.
By entering the AI debate with an official papal document, the Vatican is likely to broaden discussions not only about technological competition but also about job protection, power dispersion, and mechanisms for public oversight.
Most Commented