Pope Leo XIV and AI: Why Technology Must Serve Humanity

Pope Leo XIV

Yet public discussion remains narrowly focused on competition between AI labs or on abstract debates about the capabilities of this technology. Virtually no one is asking what purpose AI should serve, or whether our current thinking, institutions, and controls are capable of directing this technology toward broad improvements in human well-being.

It was therefore heartening to see Pope Leo XIV speak out on this issue in his first encyclical, in which he describes the current trajectory of AI as a serious threat to human dignity. As an economist who has long argued that the outcomes of technological progress are a matter of choice rather than fate, I welcome his intervention.

Leo is ahead of most commentators in pointing out that “technology is never neutral because it takes on the traits of those who develop, fund, regulate, and use it.” Yet I fear that even he has not gone far enough on the most important question: what should AI be designed for?

As Simon Johnson and I emphasize in our book Power and Progress: our millennial struggle for technology and prosperity, a technology like AI has many paths to development, and each has far-reaching implications for society. For example, Pope is right to question the current direction of AI in military and law enforcement. What was taboo just a few years ago – mass surveillance using AI, algorithms selecting targets for destruction – has become commonplace.

While many in Silicon Valley are calling for the United States to bolster its “hard power” with a new military-algorithmic complex, Leo warns that “any technology that facilitates attacks without allowing people’s faces to be seen lowers the moral threshold of conflict.” The Pope then calls for the “disarmament of AI” to free it “from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited to a mere military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.”