‘Magnifica Humanitas’: AI and the Pope

This week, 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII published the celebrated encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Leo XIII wrote in response to the impact on society made by modern industry and transformed Catholic social teaching in the process. Leo XIV updates that response, as the subtitle proclaims, in the age of artificial intelligence. Last year the Vatican issued a note on AI, Antiqua et Nova. Issuing two pronouncements in quick succession signals that the Holy See is giving AI urgent attention.

Evaluations of AI from secular authorities are not in short supply. For the most part they foreground AI’s impact on jobs (bad) and on R & D (good). The Vatican is looking at AI from a different angle:

“We cannot consider AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.”

Foregrounding the moral dimensions of AI puts a spotlight on contingencies that many other evaluations pass over.

In many ways, AI works like every other technology. It can be put to uses good or ill, depending on what the user wants it to do. But AI poses moral challenges in ways that other technologies do not. This is because AI — unlike other technology — transforms the nature of knowledge. AI’s inputs are the raw material of knowledge, namely numbers and words, which it transforms into new, artificial knowledge.

There’s the rub.

To outsource the acquisition of knowledge, that core human feature, to an external agent, brings with it the risk of compromising the very integrity of knowledge. Indeed, AI output may not only look like a genuine human creation, but even outperform the speed of human productivity. But hitherto, the acquisition of knowledge was a core attribute of human nature.

St Thomas Aquinas, quoted in this encyclical, scoped how knowledge is acquired. Knowledge comes by applying intellect, reasoning, and understanding. These are complementary capabilities: intellectus denotes insight into a truth, ratio the process of enquiry and discourse. These functions are core attributes of human nature. However, they are distinct.

Artificial intelligence is unlike human intelligence because it cannot distinguish between them. And granted, verisimilitude is not to be scoffed at. But mistaking appearance for essence leads on a slippery slope. Two successive stages of dysfunction may ensue from misconceiving the interdependence of intellectus and ratio.

We are already familiar with the first stage, the spread of fake news:

“Disinformation did not begin with AI, yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI. The ability to manipulate content, images and videos exposes people to biased or misleading perspectives.”

The second stage is that fake news compromises the integrity of decisions:

“Living amid incessant flows of information, opinions and images, we know how easy it can be to influence decisions and preferences through increasingly sophisticated algorithms.”

Fake news and specious information are more than irritants merely. They are pernicious when disseminated by “pure power detached from truth, which subtly or overtly imposes what it wishes others to accept as true.” On the transformation of culture that might be wrought by AI, the pontiff sounds a cautionary note:

“A technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can, however unintentionally, become an obstacle to change and growth. For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change. A person’s future is not calculable, but depends on one’s freedom.”

Magnifica Humanitas is not the work of a technophobe. Whatever might be the pontiff’s unease about individual personalities holding power, he endorses the right to private property. Industrial transformation has in the past been all to the good in the long run, even if those changes for the common good took time. Many passages underscore the benefits wrought by technological progress. But the metric of progress is the unfolding of human freedom — a term that appears in no fewer than 35 instances in this text.      

With a word length of over 40,000, readers who pore over Magnifica Humanitas will glean many more pointers into the thinking of Leo XIV. Given recent extensive media coverage of papal pronouncements that could be interpreted as interventions in political controversies of the day, one expects that his reference to the concept of just war may be grist to the mill of Vatican-watchers looking for hints of the pontiff’s personal animus.

It would be remiss to overlook changes to the Vatican’s perspective that are visible in plain sight. The language of Rerum Novarum was Latin. Magnifica Humanitas is issued in eight languages, one of which is Arabic. Another change is that it gives a glimpse of the pope’s taste in books and the arts. There are references to Hannah Arendt, Romano Guardini, Viktor Frankl and JR Tolkien, and to Beethoven, Picasso and Steven Spielberg. Except for Beethoven, all were born after the pontificate of Leo XIII.

Seen in the round, Magnifica Humanitas shows that fidelity to tradition does not imply that change is resisted.

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