Opinion | Pope Leo’s Encyclical on A.I. Is Disappointingly Mild - The New York Times

Leo XIV is not quite what Sylvia Townsend Warner once called an “old harmless pope,” but he certainly has a way of keeping headlines innocuous. He’s from Chicago, he likes the White Sox, he’s against the war in Iran — a year into his papacy, this is more or less what people know about him.

The mildness extends to his theological views. Unlike his recent predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Leo is not an academic theologian. Temperamentally, he is more cautious than Francis was. The questions that seem to interest Leo most are practical and pastoral. He is suspicious of grand, programmatic approaches even to the most serious questions — including that of artificial intelligence, the subject of his first encyclical letter, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was presented on Monday.

Even by the standards of modern papal encyclicals, with their uninspired phrasing, frequent auto-plagiarism and stultifying length, “Magnifica Humanitas” is disappointingly measured and cautious. (The least guarded language in the document — Leo’s dismissal of just war theory as “outdated” — has nothing to do with A.I.) Despite voicing concerns about the dangers that A.I. poses to humanity, the encyclical nonetheless seems to envision a world in which it is simply a tool, rather than an evil that all people should reject.

The text begins with the arresting image of the Tower of Babel, perhaps the greatest biblical symbol of technological hubris, but seems to miss the point of the story, which is not that the tower’s builders should have been more ethical by incorporating feedback from a more disparate assemblage of stakeholders. The moral was: Don’t build it!

Otherwise “Magnifica Humanitas” comes off as uninspired and unfocused. There are far too many unmemorable quotations and references to papal speeches. Out-of-context lines from “The Lord of the Rings” and Hannah Arendt elicited groans from at least one reader. I found myself wishing that Leo had engaged with more recent and incisive critics of technological modernity, such as the Catholic philosopher Byung-Chul Han (the author of “The Burnout Society”) and Anton Jäger, the historian of political thought whose “hyperpolitics” thesis anticipates many of Leo’s concerns.

This is not exactly the Unabomber manifesto. One is even tempted to call it naïve. The encyclical certainly does not live up to its billing as the A.I. equivalent of “Rerum Novarum,” the revolutionary text on the Industrial Revolution with which his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching in 1891. The presence of Christopher Olah, a founder of the A.I. firm Anthropic, at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday rightly raised eyebrows. (Imagine if Leo XIII had invited John D. Rockefeller to hear him speak on the dignity of labor!)