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Pope Leo XIV said Friday that “one of the serious problems today is the fact that decisions concerning human life are being entrusted to machines,” pressing his case against unaccountable artificial intelligence for the second time in a week — this time before the International Institute of Administrative Sciences, a body of public-administration scholars and civil servants he received in the Vatican’s Hall of Benediction.
The pace worries the first U.S.-born pontiff as much as the tools themselves: “The speed at which innovations in AI, in artificial intelligence, are developing prompts us to ask whether, in the future, we will be able to control these machines, and whether humanity runs the risk of becoming victim of its own inventions.”
Leo’s first warning came a week ago, when Leo told the International Catholic Legislators Network that the world already lives under “a subtle form of domination when algorithms decide who is seen, who remains invisible.” Innovation, he warned the lawmakers, must never become “another vehicle for ideological or economic colonialism.”
The heart of that address was the family, which Leo called “the first school of humanity,” the place where a person learns “trust before calculation.”
None of this should surprise any of our regular readers.
Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of his pontificate, landed on Memorial Day like a wholesale papal indictment of the machine age. When Fortune asked me this week why the pope keeps circling back to the subject, I told them the document was built to be unspooled over time: “Oftentimes what will happen is over weeks and months the pope will reveal different parts of that encyclical.” August has now proven the point multiple times over.
I also found that the pope’s moral bulwark against AI excesses has been hard for Silicon Valley to counter: “Leo XIV represents something of a quagmire for [Silicon Valley] because he cannot be bought off, he cannot be terrorized, he can’t be indicted, he can’t be deported.”
An industry accustomed to negotiating with people who want something from it has met a man who wants nothing it sells. The encyclical was already making a dent in Trump’s Washington by early June, and the drumbeat since then has only made it harder for lawmakers of either party to look away.
His deepest fear is clearly the subjugation of the human person to the things the human person has built. Nearly everything he has said about the technology this summer, whether to lawmakers or to the civil servants he received on Friday, runs back to that single worry.
What drew far less attention was the audience he held a day earlier, and it’s nearly impossible to understand the pope’s Friday artificial intelligence address without it.
