Pope Leo XIV just wrote Magnifica Humanitas, a 40,000 words Encyclical Letter about artificial intelligence. He compares Silicon Valley to the Tower of Babel, warns that algorithms are quietly deciding who gets a job or a loan, and even apologizes for the Church's own past sins. It might be the most important document about technology you'll never read — so I read it for you. And while I applaud most of it, as an economic historian I have a bone to pick with the ghost of the Luddites hovering between its lines.
A social encyclical for the age of AI
On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas ("The Grandeur of Humanity"), an encyclical letter "on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence" (Leo XIV, 2026). The date was no accident. Exactly 135 years earlier, on 15 May 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, the document that founded what we now call the Social Doctrine of the Church — the Church's body of teaching on work, the economy, and justice (Leo XIII, 1891). Back then, the "new things" (res novae) were factories, industrial capitalism, and the exploitation of workers. Today, the new pope argues, the res novae are digitalization, robotics, and AI (Leo XIV, 2026, para. 4).
The encyclical is built around two biblical construction sites. The first is the Tower of Babel: a grandiose project of "a single language, a single technology, a single direction," built on pride and self-sufficiency, which ends in confusion and dispersion (para. 7). The second is Nehemiah's rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile: a patient, shared effort in which every family gets its own section of the wall to repair (para. 8). The choice we face with AI, Leo XIV says, is not a simple "yes" or "no" to technology, but "between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem" (para. 9). It is a genuinely beautiful image, and it frames everything that follows.
Chapter Three, the heart of the document, deals directly with AI. Leo XIV is refreshingly precise about what these systems are and are not. He notes that modern AI systems are more "cultivated" than "built" — even their designers do not fully understand their inner workings (para. 98). He insists that we should not confuse machine "intelligence" with human intelligence: AI systems "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships" (para. 99). They can simulate empathy, but simulation is not relationship — and the real danger is not that we mistake a chatbot for a person, but that we "gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections" (para. 100).
The Pope's sharpest observation, in my view, concerns power. In the nineteenth century, states largely steered industrialization. Today, "the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments" (para. 5). A handful of companies control the data, the computing power, and the platforms. Leo XIV calls this a new, predominantly "private" form of technological power and demands transparency, accountability, and democratic oversight (paras. 95, 105–108). He even coins a memorable verb for it: we must "disarm" AI — free it from the mentality of armed competition and monopolistic control (para. 110).
What I like: AI enters the social doctrine
Here is my first point, and it is one of genuine admiration. By embedding AI in the Social Doctrine of the Church, Leo XIV connects today's digital transition to a 135-year-old tradition that has consistently drawn attention to the dehumanizing side of industrial revolutions — when these are not addressed by a state oriented toward the common good.
That tradition has an impressive track record. Rerum Novarum defended fair wages and workers' associations in 1891 (Leo XIII, 1891). Quadragesimo Anno denounced concentrated economic power in 1931. Laborem Exercens made the dignity of work the key to the whole social question in 1981 (John Paul II, 1981). Leo XIV explicitly places his own text in this line, applying classic principles — human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity — to algorithms, data, and platforms (Leo XIV, 2026, paras. 46, 109).
The section on unemployment in Chapter Four shows why this matters. The Pope acknowledges the "legitimate fear of a significant and rapid contraction in available jobs" (para. 151) and warns of a two-tier labor market: "outsized remuneration for a highly specialized minority alongside declining wages for a large portion of the workforce" (para. 151). His answer is not to stop innovation but to govern the transition. He proposes three practical criteria: social criteria for innovation (automation should come with verifiable measures for retraining and worker participation), proactive policies making continuous training accessible to all "ensuring that the cost of adaptation does not fall solely on individuals," and corporate commitment to quality of work as an indicator of success (para. 156).
This is, frankly, a description of what the Nordic countries — Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark — and the Netherlands have long practiced, and what France and Germany do to a considerable extent: "flexicurity" models that combine dynamic labor markets with strong retraining mechanisms and a robust social safety net. Where such institutions exist, technological transitions have historically been less traumatic and less politically explosive. The encyclical's insistence that "access to work for all must be a high priority for public policies" (para. 154) and that we must "oversee the transformation in advance" rather than "react only when jobs disappear" (para. 156) is precisely the lesson those countries internalized decades ago. It is good — and honestly, somewhat remarkable — to see a papal document articulate it so concretely.
What I like less: where are the upsides?
My second point is a criticism. The encyclical rightly observes that technology is never value-neutral: "it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it" (para. 9), and every system "embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes" (para. 104). This is correct and important. Anyone who claims that a hiring algorithm or a recommendation engine is a neutral tool has not been paying attention.
But the correct observation is followed by a long — very long — list of concerns: manipulation, surveillance, addiction, exploitation of data workers, environmental costs, autonomous weapons, digital colonialism (paras. 100–110, 141–142, 170–179). The Pope does say, repeatedly, that these innovations "can greatly serve integral human development" (para. 93) and that technology "has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home" (para. 9). Yet these affirmations remain abstract, a sentence or two, while the risks get entire sections.
What is missing is the concrete evidence of the enormous upside that already exists. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold, an AI system that solved the fifty-year-old problem of protein folding, and to David Baker for computational protein design (Nobel Prize Outreach, 2024a). The same year, the Physics prize honored John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational work in machine learning (Nobel Prize Outreach, 2024b). AlphaFold has predicted the structures of essentially all known proteins and is used by millions of researchers working on diseases, antibiotics, and enzymes that break down plastic. These are not speculative promises; they are recognized scientific breakthroughs with direct consequences for the poor and the sick the encyclical cares so deeply about.
And there is a delicious irony lurking in the encyclical's own central metaphor. The curse of Babel, after all, was precisely the confusion of tongues: people who could no longer understand each other were scattered across the earth. Yet one of the most tangible gifts of modern AI is reliable, instant translation between virtually any pair of languages — for the first time in human history. A migrant at a border crossing, a doctor treating a patient who speaks another language, a student in Nairobi reading research published in Mandarin: all can now understand and be understood. It is hard to see how a technology that quite literally undoes the confusion of Babel can be cast primarily as a force for uniformity and control, rather than celebrated as a bridge builder between peoples. The Pope worries about "a single language — even a digital one" that flattens diversity (para. 10); but machine translation does the opposite. It allows every people to keep speaking its own language while still understanding the others — which sounds, if anything, less like Babel and more like Pentecost.
More troubling is the implicit suggestion running through parts of Chapter Four that increased inequality, unemployment, and exclusion of the poor are the natural, almost inevitable trajectory of the technology — that "technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities" unless design is changed (para. 161). But nothing here is inevitable. Whether AI widens or narrows gaps is the consequence of policy choices that democratic societies make: choices about education, taxation, competition law, data governance, and social insurance. To be fair, the Pope himself says something similar — teaching new generations "that technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility" is called "one of the most valuable services to the common good" (para. 238). I only wish the encyclical had made that its dominant note rather than its coda. As lay people, it is part of our responsibility — through voting, civic engagement, and professional practice — to ensure wise policies are in place. Fatalism about technology is as much a dereliction of that duty as blind enthusiasm.
The Luddites were wrong — an economic historian's footnote
My third point comes from my own field. Between 1811 and 1816, English textile workers known as Luddites smashed mechanical looms, convinced that machines would permanently destroy their livelihoods. Two centuries of economic history have delivered a clear verdict: they were wrong about the long run. New technologies by themselves do not eliminate jobs in the aggregate. Productivity growth generates economic growth, which generates demand for new goods and services, which generates new occupations — usually more than enough to compensate for the old ones lost. Roughly 60% of the jobs Americans held in 2018 did not even exist in 1940 (Autor et al., 2024). The economist Joel Mokyr and colleagues have shown that anxiety about technological unemployment has recurred with every major innovation wave since the Industrial Revolution, and has so far always proved unfounded at the aggregate level (Mokyr et al., 2015).
Admittedly — and here the Pope and I fully agree — the transition can be brutal. The handloom weavers of Lancashire really did see their wages collapse for a generation. Aggregate statistics are cold comfort to a 55-year-old whose skills just became obsolete. That is exactly why it is the responsibility of the state to diminish these downsides through retraining, income support, and active labor market policies — the Nordic recipe again. The encyclical's warning about regions trapped in "hybrid economies" of underpaid labor and partial technologies (Leo XIV, 2026, para. 153) is well taken: the transition will be uneven across the globe, and international cooperation matters.
But there is also a responsibility the encyclical touches only lightly: the responsibility of the individual. As a knowledge worker or skilled laborer, keeping on top of technological developments that can raise your own productivity is not optional self-optimization; it is prudent stewardship of your own talents — something the parable of the talents, which the Pope himself cites (para. 9), rather strongly endorses. Waiting passively for the state or your employer to retrain you is a strategy with a poor historical track record.
Conclusion: reasons for optimism
So where does this leave us? Magnifica Humanitas is a serious, learned, and often moving document. Its diagnosis of concentrated private technological power is sharp. Its embedding of AI in a long tradition of social teaching gives the debate moral depth that purely technical or economic discussions lack. Its practical proposals on work — retraining, participation, dignity as a metric of success — deserve a wide audience among policymakers.
Its weakness is a matter of balance. Radical technological optimism paired with an extreme libertarian view of the state is certainly not warranted — the encyclical demolishes that position convincingly. But neither is the quiet pessimism that seeps through its catalog of risks. History teaches that general-purpose technologies, wisely governed, have been the greatest engines of human flourishing we know: longer lives, less drudgery, more knowledge. AI shows every sign of belonging to that category — from protein folding to a world in which, for the first time since Babel, no language need be a barrier.
The Pope asks whether AI makes human life "more human in every aspect" (para. 129, quoting John Paul II, 1979). My answer, on the evidence so far and on the lessons of two centuries of economic history, is: it can, and on balance it is hard not to be optimistic that it will — provided we build Jerusalem's walls together, section by section, rather than leaving the blueprints to a handful of tower-builders. On that last point, at least, the Pope and this economic historian are in complete agreement.
References
Autor, D., Chin, C., Salomons, A., & Seegmiller, B. (2024). New frontiers: The origins and content of new work, 1940–2018. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 139(3), 1399–1465. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae008
John Paul II. (1979). Redemptor hominis [Encyclical letter]. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis.html
John Paul II. (1981). Laborem exercens [Encyclical letter]. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html
Leo XIII. (1891). Rerum novarum [Encyclical letter]. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
Leo XIV. (2026). Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence [Encyclical letter]. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Mokyr, J., Vickers, C., & Ziebarth, N. L. (2015). The history of technological anxiety and the future of economic growth: Is this time different? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 31–50. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.3.31
Nobel Prize Outreach. (2024a). The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024. NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/summary/
Nobel Prize Outreach. (2024b). The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/
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