Pope Leo applies Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence

This is the third of a series of columns by the author on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.” This piece focuses on Chapter 3. For earlier columns, see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 .

(RNS) —  After summarizing Catholic social teaching in Chapter 2 of his encyclical, “ Magnifica Humanitas ” (Magnificent Humanity), Pope Leo XIV applies this teaching to modern digital technology, especially artificial intelligence.

In particular, Pope Leo argues that AI should respect human dignity, foster the common good and not simply empower and enrich those who are developing AI.

Like Pope Francis before him, Leo denounces “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions.”

When this paradigm rules, Leo argues, technology is not just a tool, “it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

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