Ettore Ferrari / EPA
Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost, from the USA.
The first major document of Leo XIV’s pontificate calls for the “disarmament” of AI, with the support of multiple cultural references.
Pope Leo XIV this week called for the “disarmament” of artificial intelligence (AI) to “prevent it from dominating humanity”, with some curious references.
In his first encyclical, “Magnificent Humanity”, dedicated to the protection of human dignity in the age of AI, the Pope states that technological innovations are not neutral, and can “increase participation and justice”, but also “increase inequalities, control and exclusion”, warning of the danger of AI “concentrating in the hands of a few”.
In the one who is first major document of his pontificateof 110 pages and around 42 thousand words, Leo XIV addresses one of the main challenges of today, calling for “a fair social order in the digital age”, with an “adequate legal framework”, “fair rules” and “effective protection mechanisms”.
The pastoral letter is addressed to bishops, but is often intended for all Catholics. In it, interestingly, Leo XIV quotes Picasso, Beethovenhistorian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr.the film ‘Schindler’s List’ and even Gandalfa character from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, to argue that authentic art and culture resist the “normalization of evil”.
The Pope sees in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a desire for unity; in Guernica, by Picasso, a “denouncement of dehumanization”; in Schindler’s List, an appeal “ to relegate the past to oblivion“.
“Even today, colonialism takes on new forms. It no longer just dominates bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information”, quotes . “Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: ensuring that shared knowledge becomes a true common good, and not an instrument of domination.”
“It is not up to us to master all the tides of the world, but to do what we can for the good of those years in which we are, eradicating evil in the fields we know, so that those who live after will have clean land to cultivate”, he writes — a passage attributed to Gandalf in “The Return of the King”.
The text also calls on American Hannah Arendt to warn that indifference to the truth can lead to totalitarianism. And remember Martin Luther King Jr., to underline that History changes when individuals really take the dignity of everyone seriously.
