The Pope Is Now the World's Most Famous Humanist

AI is presented as a threat that dehumanizes people by squeezing essential human elements from daily life. The focus is not only on criticizing Silicon Valley ambitions, but on identifying what is actually worth saving about being human. A key concern is the ideology of inevitability, where history is treated as moving toward superintelligent machines and dissenters are dismissed as helpless. The response is to push back against that determinism and insist on moral clarity about human value. The encyclical is also linked to earlier papal teaching on industrialization flattening human beings, reinforcing a continuity of concern for human dignity.

"Great stuff, but lose the Tower of Babel. It's a tired cliché. Most of us have already been told that those who would seek to be like God will see their ambitions crash to the ground. And in this instance, the lesson has a limited audience. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the tower builders should have an image of the tower tattooed on their chest. But the rest of us, who mostly suffer the fallout from those godlike men and their aspirations, are just trying to get through our days."

"The pope does two very useful things in his screed: He identifies the threat of AI as a form of dehumanization, and then he asserts, with passion and clear eyes, what is actually worth saving about being human. This second part of the argument is often left vague-or left out-when people talk about the threat of AI. Many people feel uncomfortable with a technology that seems to be squeezing some essential-feeling elements, like thinking, out of our lives, but then don't spend a lot of time trying to articulate what is being lost."

"The ideology of Silicon Valley is one of inevitability: History is moving, with Hegelian determinism, in one direction-toward superintelligent machines-and anyone who questions or worries about what this means is made to feel like they are waving their hands in the path of a freight train. I've had so many conversations with proselytizers that end with, Well, it's coming, so you better get used to it.What Leo does is push back against the inevitability."

Read at The Atlantic