As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words

Silicon Valley has always had messianic dreams, dating back to the days when computers filled entire rooms.

One of the oldest industry jokes has a programmer asking a computer, “Is there a God?” The computer answers: “There is now.” The Whole Earth Catalog, a proto-hacker compendium of tools that deeply influenced Steve Jobs, proclaimed, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

By investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, tech leaders are signaling that those early dreams have been fulfilled. Next stop, transcendence.

Just as the new religion of A.I. seemed to be solidifying its control over mankind’s destiny, however, a new voice is being heard on the other side of the world.

Its message to the tech industry: Slow down. Elevate the human. Machines are not gods.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published with great ceremony on Monday his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity.” The 42,300-word policy statement is respectful and named no names, but is at heart a sharp rebuke to Silicon Valley’s assertions that it alone can be trusted to develop the future.

“A.I. can be a valuable tool,” the pope acknowledged, but the technology “tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” Without adequate oversight and transparency, he warned, “those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems.”

That would be bad news, he said: “A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

The encyclical is expected to be at the center of the 70-year-old pontiff’s reign in the same way that Rerum Novarum, which advocated for workers’ rights and a fair wage, was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII’s papacy at the end of the 19th century. Released while Silicon Valley slept, Magnifica Humanitas marked the latest effort to shape and possibly…

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