Bangkok Post – The pope and the artificial intelligence profiteers
Bangkok Post – The pope and the artificial intelligence profiteers
Publish Date: 2026-06-09 22:35:00
Source Domain: www.bangkokpost.com
Pope Leo XIV is pictured after laying a golden rose at the Virgin Mary altar during a prayer to Our Lady of Almudena at the Cathedral of the Holy Mary of Almudena in Madrid on Monday. (Photo: AFP)
The Tower of Babel is the biblical story of how humanity, united by a single language and a single ambition, attempts to build a tower to heaven. The project ends in collapse, with God punishing the builders for their hubris by fragmenting humanity into different languages and cultures. The parable, which Pope Leo XIV explicitly invokes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, bears an uncanny resemblance to AI. Will the technology be humankind’s salvation, as its evangelists claim, or will it lead to damnation, as sceptics fear?
Human civilisation is already well into an AI arms race to write the script of the future in code. Technology companies are spending billions of dollars to create systems that promise to transform knowledge, work, warfare, politics, and perhaps human consciousness itself. Public discourse oscillates between utopianism and panic. And now, one of the world’s oldest institutions has entered the conversation to warn about a race to the bottom.
This moment resembles previous periods of economic excess. The technology sector’s confidence is reminiscent of the financial sector’s before 2008, when a small group of insiders insisted that they had mastered a transformative system that outsiders could not fully understand. Extraordinary fortunes were built on the promise of a future radically improved by financial engineering, while red flags were dismissed as evidence of ignorance or fear. Among the few voices of reason was the economist Raghuram G Rajan, who is now cautioning against AI…
