Last month Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's about artificial intelligence, and what it might be doing to our sense of being human. He called it Magnifica Humanitas, "Magnificent Humanity," and he presented it himself at the Vatican, which popes usually leave to cardinals. Sitting beside him was Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude.
The Pope's worry isn't mainly that AI takes our jobs. A few of his actual claims, simplified by Claude so we can discuss where we agree, disagree, etc:
- Technology is never neutral. It carries the values of whoever builds, funds, and deploys it. There's no such thing as "just a tool."
- The real danger is treating ourselves as products. When we start treating humans as products to be upgraded, perfected, or surpassed, it gets easier to decide some people are worth less than others.
- Neither the market nor AI will save us. Both are things we make. Neither can tell us what we're for.
- AI has to be "disarmed" eg pulled out of the logics of domination and profit-at-any-cost. But disarming isn't enough. We have to build something in its place: rebuilt bonds between humans.
- The quiet risk is idolatry Outsourcing our thinking, and eventually our judgment, to the machine until we forget how to do it ourselves.
When the cardinal who presented the document was asked what actually makes humans worth protecting, he didn't offer a definition. He offered a list: Guernica. Schindler's List. Beethoven's Ninth. Martin Luther King. Mandela. Mother Teresa. And the countless unnamed people who quietly do the right thing at a cost to themselves. His argument: a species that produces these, even in the middle of its worst horrors, is showing you something irreducible. (Reminds me of the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation). He tied it to suffering, too: you can't strip pain out of human life without also stripping out love, because to love anything is to become able to be hurt for it.
One irresistible footnote before the hard part: after the encyclical came out, researchers ran the text through an AI-detector and reported signs that parts might have been AI-assisted. The Vatican hasn't confirmed anything, and one analysis still put it at roughly 94% human. A 42,000-word warning against handing our thinking over to machines, possibly written in part by one. Make of that what you will. This post was written almost entirely by Claude: also make of that what you will.
Here's where it gets interesting, and where I want your take.
The Pope grounds human dignity in something specific: we are made in the image of God. That's the floor under everything else he says. But that floor isn't shared. A secular humanist locates dignity somewhere else, perhaps in consciousness, in the capacity to reason or to suffer, in the agreement to treat one another as ends rather than means. A transhumanist rejects the premise outright: there is no fixed human essence to protect, and "improving" the species is the whole point, not the threat.
So the encyclical quietly forces a question bigger than AI: where does human worth actually come from? Because if we can't agree on that, we won't agree on what AI is allowed to do to us. And we're going to have to decide soon.
That's this week's open question.