Pope Leo’s first encyclical offers a vision in which human dignity and relationships guide technological development rather than people becoming slaves to technology.
Pope Leo XIV has just released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“The Grandeur of Humanity”), which addresses the rise of artificial intelligence and thereby enters one of the defining debates of our time. While AI is the immediate focus, the deeper concern is not technological innovation itself but the changing conditions through which human beings understand themselves and experience reality.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII, published Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”). That encyclical confronted the alienating conditions born of the industrial revolution. Like that earlier document, the current encyclical addresses a moment of profound technological advancement and asks what kind of social world is being built around these new forces.
Pope Leo XIV has described this challenge as “not technological, but anthropological”: the central question is not simply what AI can do, but what kind of human beings it may be helping to create.
The consequences are already visible within education which, Pope Leo argues, is not merely the transfer of information but human formation. He warns that “the speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions”. There is good reason for this concern, as recent Australian research suggests more than four in five students aged 14–17 already use generative AI for schoolwork, while almost 80 per cent of university students now use it to structure essays, generate arguments and organise written work.
Pope Leo’s concern is not that students are becoming lazy or that technology itself is dangerous. Rather, he asks whether human beings increasingly risk surrendering precisely those capacities through which they understand and orient themselves within the world.
One of the central images in Magnifica Humanitas is the Tower of Babel, where humanity attempts to build upward toward heaven through its own collective ingenuity. The biblical story has often been interpreted as a warning against human pride and the desire to transcend human limitations. Pope Leo contrasts Babel with the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, a project of shared responsibility and human flourishing. He poses a deceptively simple question: what are we building?
Although philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is often remembered as a critic of religion and one of the 19th century’s most influential atheistic thinkers, he raised a similar concern. Feuerbach argued that human beings project their own dreams, fears and desires into the heavens and call it God. In doing so, they gradually forget that these qualities emerged from human life itself and begin treating their own projection as something objective and superior. The danger for Feuerbach was that human beings risked becoming subordinate to powers they themselves had created.
Pope Leo’s image of Babel and Feuerbach’s concern with projection converge upon a similar possibility. Human beings may create systems and technologies intended to serve them, only to find themselves increasingly adapting to their demands. Whereas our ancestors did not believe they had created the God they worshipped and obeyed, human beings have created an intelligence outside themselves, fully aware that they have made it, yet increasingly behaving as though it were wiser than they are.
The problem raised by Feuerbach and Pope Leo is visible in everyday life, particularly in the ways technology increasingly shapes work and education. While AI promises greater efficiency and productivity, the pope warns that current approaches often “force workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work”. Work, he insists, is not merely an instrument or source of income but something that “expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives”.
These trends are increasingly visible within the gig economy, where algorithms shape the pace and conditions of labour. Delivery riders often describe a world governed by ratings and automated metrics. One delivery rider interviewed in Australia captured this experience succinctly: “There’s nobody you can talk to. Everything is automated.” Rather than technology adapting itself to human beings, human beings increasingly adapt themselves to technological systems.
Pope Leo’s encyclical rejects both technological pessimism and technological utopianism. Throughout Magnifica Humanitas he contrasts two competing visions of civilisation: Babel seeks power, domination and technological mastery; Jerusalem is rebuilt slowly, “piece by piece” through cooperation, justice and care for the common good.
Seen in this light, the central problem raised by AI is not simply whether machines will become more intelligent than human beings. The deeper question is whether human beings increasingly risk becoming subordinate to systems they themselves have created.
To avoid this possibility, Magnifica Humanitas points toward what Pope Leo calls a “civilization of love”. Rather than a naïve ideal, it is a vision in which human dignity and relationships guide technological development. In the end, the future of AI may depend less on whether machines become more human than whether human beings remain conscious of what makes them human in the first place.
Adrian Rosenfeldt
Dr Adrian Rosenfeldt teaches at Melbourne University. He is a journalist, public speaker and the author of The God Debaters: New Atheist Identity-Making and the Religious Self in the New Millennium (2022).