Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on Artifical Intelligence (AI) Falls Short!
THE POPE DID NOT GO FAR ENOUGH ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: SUMMARY OF ANTON BARBA-KAY’S ASSESSMENT OF POPE LEO XIV’S ENCYCLICAL: MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS
Professor Gilbert Morris
1. The #encyclical’s reception reveals an institutional vacuum. “Magnifica Humanitas”attracted unusual public attention precisely because no secular institution commands sufficient moral authority to address artificial intelligence comprehensively. The Church’s rhetorical power here derives less from its theological resources than from the absence of credible alternatives: a sociological condition that itself demands analysis. To paraphrase #Spivak: all of humanity is now a subaltern that cannot speak.
2. The technocratic paradigm is ambient, not avowed. Barba-Kay’s sharpest observation is that the encyclical’s own language - of which #Heidegger" warned: technology as tool, responsible use, human-friendly design - reproduces the very premises it nominally critiques. Any reform language that begins with utility and guidance has already conceded the essential ground; the rupture required to reposition the #Overton #Window demands a more radical command of the word itself.
3. The Pope relies on a ‘tool-metaphor’ but that is structurally inadequate. Drawing on Harold Innis’s “media theory,” Barba-Kay argues that technologies of communication reorganise the architecture of #attention, #symbolism, and "#community; they do not merely serve pre-existing ends. All governance frameworks premised on “responsible use” are therefore not merely insufficient; they actively mislead, because they presuppose a stable sovereign chooser that the technology is already in the process of dissolving.
4. Artificial intelligence is a technology of the logos itself, placing it in a categorically distinct class. Unlike industrial machinery, which acts upon the body and material conditions from without, large language models operate upon speech, reasoning, and the very medium of human self-interpretation, outside the rhythm of any #adoptive or #adaptive timescale. This may be the first technology to constitute a genuine anthropological threshold rather than merely a social or economic disruption of which the social media phase, already Huxleyean in character, is nearly complete.
5. Cognitive deskilling and automation #bias represent an #epistemic crisis. The encyclical imagines persons whose judgment remains substantially intact making prudent choices about artificial intelligence. Barba-Kay identifies this as already anachronistic. Educational institutions that postpone confronting this - as Catholic schools are currently invited to do through “responsible and creative use” - are accelerating cognitive erosion under a dissonance masquerading as benevolent administrative rationale.
6. The greater danger is practical indifference to the distinction between human and machine intelligence. Barba-Kay correctly notes that avowed transhumanists are few; the mass phenomenon is the quiet normalisation of functional equivalence, treating a language model’s output as interchangeable with human speech without any apparent #metaphysical commitment to that equivalence. This is a behavioural rather than doctrinal apostasy from the human…operating below the threshold of belief.
7. The industrial analogy misrepresents the mechanism of digital #capitalism. In “Rerum Novarum” 1891, Pope Leo XIII addressed coercive external institutional pressures of the Industrial Revolution, in which Magnifica Humanitas has drawn. But #digital technologies operate through internalised incentive structures that feel like #freedom. Collective bargaining, labour law, and rights frameworks are instruments appropriate to external compulsion (up until 2013) and are substantially inoperative against technologies that #colonise desire from within.
8. The Church’s genuine comparative advantage - the defence of irreducible human dignity - is deployed at the wrong level of abstraction. Barba-Kay’s argument implies that the relevant question is whether the daily practices through which persons develop attention, reverence, and discernment are being systematically destroyed. This demands an anthropology of habit, not merely a theology of the person and demands that every centre of human life not yet colonised be activated against what is an onrushing #cascade.
9. The recommendation of moderate or responsible use is, under present conditions, counter-productive. Barba-Kay’s analogy to #narcotics is more than polemical. #Addiction research since the work of psychologist Stanton Peele and neuroscientist Kent Berridge establishes that dependency mechanisms operate through the restructuring of reward and wanting systems prior to #conscious deliberation. If artificial intelligence operates analogously upon cognition - restructuring what counts as sufficient thought before the person recognises that restructuring has occurred - then “moderate use” counsel is an outrage of insufficiency: a form of permission that normalises the #dependency relationship.
10. The essay itself demonstrates, by its silence, a structural limitation it shares with the encyclical. Barba-Kay identifies what the #Church should have demanded - categorical restrictions on #emotional, #therapeutic, #liturgical, and early-educational artificial intelligence - whilst failing to address the institutional mechanism by which such restrictions could be enforced in a #pluralist society where Catholic schools, hospitals, and universities operate within state regulatory frameworks that have already moved in the opposite direction. The most serious inadequacy of both the encyclical and its critique is the absence of a theory of institutional #resistance capable of operating across jurisdictions where no single authority commands sufficient power to impose categorical limits on a #technology already, in Barba-Kay’s own terms, practically impossible to opt out of.
We will not be saved by self-satisfying yearnings or intramural eloquence. We face a self-evolving menace slouching toward Bethlehem. The capacity to grasp what is dying is itself being lost and by such means the world will end, not with a bang, but a whimper.
