AI’s choice: do we build Babel or Jerusalem?
AI’s choice: do we build Babel or Jerusalem?
https://www.catholicregister.org/item/3974-ais-choice-do-we-build-babel-or-jerusalem
Publish Date: 2026-05-30 05:10:00
Source Domain: www.catholicregister.org
Matthew Harvey Sanders has
long presaged the choice civilization must make between the golden path of
artificial intelligence development leading to human flourishing and a dark
road defined by existential dread and transhumanism.
In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s
historic first encyclical concerned with “Safeguarding the Human Person in the
Time of Artificial Intelligence,” the pontiff presented his own two-road
metaphorical construct.
Leo warns that “technology has the power to
heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide,
exclude and generate new forms of injustice.” The Bishop of Rome is
foreshadowing the inescapable decision confronting humanity between
constructing a new Tower of Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem — a choice “between a
power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the
presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”
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Sanders, the Canadian creator of the world-leading Catholic Large Language Model (LLM) Magisterium AI, was inside the Vatican’s Synod
Hall on May 25 for the encyclical signing event. He beheld seeds of the latter
collaborative dynamic as Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, and
Amanda Askell, the Scottish philosopher who developed the Claude chatbot’s
inherent nature, exhibited their company’s AI ethics alliance with the Holy
See. He said many more figures in the AI space are welcoming the
arrival of Magnifica humanitas.
“What I’m seeing more than anything else is
the industry desperately feels that some moral voice has to step in and just
try to activate people because some heads of the biggest AI labs in the world
are concerned about the disruption that AI and robotics will cause labour,”
said Sanders. “They see this transition could likely be very rough as a result,
and they’re just not seeing enough (response). We forget that these heads of AI
labs are not robots. They’re people who have kids and care…
