Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

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posted May 26 @ 04:02 PM by Jason Kottke · gift link

Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical letter yesterday; it’s entitled Magnifica Humanitas Of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It is very long and I haven’t been able to read the whole thing; here’s a taste:

It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.

You can replace “AI”, “tools”, and “systems” in that paragraph with “a certain sort of amoral tech billionaire like Musk, Andreessen, and Thiel” or “a data-driven business focused solely on maximizing shareholder value” and it’s no less true. (“It’s just business.”)

Simon Willison’s notes on the encyclical are interesting; he calls it “some of the clearest writing I’ve seen on the ethics of integrating AI into modern society”. I noted this part as well while skimming through:

For individuals as well as for nations, development is both a duty and a right. Minimum conditions are required for enabling every person and people to flourish in accord with their dignity, without being kept in a state of dependence or excluded from access to necessary goods. Development is truly human when it places people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples as well as individuals. Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles, preventing them from realizing their full potential.

And:

The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions — concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation — risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,” and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.

The Catholic Church is the Catholic Church, but plain language with some real thought and tradition behind it is welcome in the AI discussion. As Tim Carmody says:

I’ve said it before but it’s something else to watch a gifted author (with a team of talented researchers) discuss AI with the weight of a 2000-year intellectual and moral tradition behind them, both reckoning with that tradition and trying to project far into the future. Very different from “how will this affect Nvidia’s stock price”.

And Chris Xu:

Skimmed the encyclical and was repeatedly struck by how shocking (good) it feels to read a coherent institutional vision / strategy for how to maneuver through These Times rooted in common sense and firm principles. We have been intellectually failed and starved by so many other institutions.

You can read the whole thing in English (and nine other languages) on the Holy See’s website or read a summary.

Comments 4

Michael Miller 2026-05-26T20:51:07Z

So happy The Pope agrees. I've been a hearty skeptic of this extractive technology. Its great that the light is being shed.

W

Wiley Hodges 2026-05-27T14:50:40Z

My read of the encyclical isn’t that Pope Leo is a skeptic about AI. I think it’s that he’s skeptical that it’s being built to serve humanity. In reading it, I was reminded of Ted Chiang’s quote about our fears about AI really being fears about Capitalism.

Reply in this thread

R

Ross Bell 2026-05-26T21:48:00Z Edited

“Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations.”
I’ve been thinking about what “justice” means in this day and age. Your president Trump has co-opted the word to mean revenge, retribution and suppression of ideas he doesn’t like. Since “justice” seems to be a fairly universal concept and a powerful motivator of human behaviour it may be time to have a serious debate about what it means and how we manifest it.
Can there be liberal justice in opposition to conservative justice? Is justice a religious concept, a legal concept, a moral concept? Can justice be separated from politics or is it inherently political?
Can AI even understand the concept of justice?

J

Jeremiads 2026-05-27T03:26:12Z Edited

In my view, justice stems from coherence, which is how it links to reasoning (ie, reasoning allows us to compare our actions and their consequences coherently). Societies with coherent and widely-accepted moral principles (ie, societies in which what’s good for the goose is good for the gander) will result in less conflict (at least within their own boundaries).

In that sense, I don’t completely agree with the encyclical’s phrasing, that

Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples

because to me, justice flows from rights and duties, which stem from our foundational values. Our foundational values tell us what matters to us and, through reasoning, lead to certain rights and duties. Through the coherent application of those rights and duties, we achieve justice. I do understand why the encyclical inverts that, though, because “justice”, as you’ve pointed out, is usually a much clearer north star for us humans than “rights and duties”. The encyclical uses “justice” to refer to a set of foundational values that are important to this Pope (universal human dignity being the chief one), because it’s trying to convince people to adopt those values.

The reason why Trump and others like him have been able to co-opt the concept of justice is that they haven’t really co-opted it at all. They’ve just forced it to operate according to their own warped and self-serving foundational values. It’s nothing new. So the problem, as I see it, isn’t so much our ability to act justly, but our foundational values. And, unfortunately, we can only assert those. Our entire moral and ethical systems will always flow from unprovable basic assertions, eg: truth is good, suffering is bad, life is sacrosanct, etc. Attempts to demonstrate the natural validity of foundational values through logic or proof have always failed, valiant as they may have been (just ask Kant). Our values will always be a tiny flame that we have to shield from the cold darkness of the inanimate.

I’m not religious, and I get the sense that most people in the Kottke.org-reading community aren’t either. But there is one important lesson we could all learn from the religious, in my view, which is that we should treat our basic values like gods. We should stop asking where they come from or why they’re valid, and become more comfortable asserting and defending them (if necessary, by force). The idea that all living beings have inherent and sacred dignity is absolutely a good thing, and if we believe in it we shouldn’t feel the need to justify it. We should instead glorify it, strive to apply it coherently whenever we have to make difficult decisions, and fight tooth and nail whenever it’s challenged. That’s how we get to justice.

In my view, justice stems from coherence, which is how it links to reasoning (ie, reasoning allows us to compare our actions and their consequences coherently). Societies with coherent and widely-accepted moral principles (ie, societies in which what’s good for the goose is good for the gander) will result in less conflict (at least within their own boundaries). In that sense, I don’t completely agree with the encyclical’s phrasing, that

Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples

because to me, justice flows from rights and duties, which stem from our foundational values. Our foundational values tell us what matters to us and, through reasoning, lead to certain rights and duties. Through the coherent application of those rights and duties, we achieve justice. I do understand why the encyclical inverts that, though, because “justice”, as you’ve pointed out, is usually a much clearer north star for us humans than “rights and duties”. The encyclical uses “justice” to refer to a set of foundational values that are important to this Pope (universal human dignity being the chief one), because it’s trying to convince people to adopt those values. The reason why Trump and others like him have been able to co-opt the concept of justice is that they haven’t really co-opted it at all. They’ve just forced it to operate according to their own warped and self-serving foundational values. It’s nothing new. So the problem, as I see it, isn’t so much our ability to act justly, but our foundational values. And, unfortunately, we can only assert those. Our entire moral and ethical systems will always flow from unprovable basic assertions, eg: truth is good, suffering is bad, life is sacrosanct, etc. Attempts to demonstrate the natural validity of foundational values through logic or proof have always failed, valiant as they may have been (just ask Kant). Our values will always be a tiny flame that we have to shield from the cold darkness of the inanimate. I’m not religious, and I get the sense that most people in the Kottke.org-reading community aren’t either. But there is one important lesson we could all learn from the religious, in my view, which is that we should treat our basic values like gods. We should stop asking where they come from or why they’re valid, and become more comfortable asserting and defending them (if necessary, by force). The idea that all living beings have inherent and sacred dignity is absolutely a good thing, and if we believe in it we shouldn’t feel the need to justify it. We should instead glorify it, strive to apply it coherently whenever we have to make difficult decisions, and fight tooth and nail whenever it’s challenged. That’s how we get to justice.

Original comment

In my view, justice stems from coherence, which is how it links to reasoning (ie, reasoning allows us to compare our actions and their consequences coherently). Societies with coherent and widely-accepted moral principles (ie, societies in which what’s good for the goose is good for the gander) will result in less conflict (at least within their own boundaries).

In that sense, I don’t completely agree with the encyclical’s phrasing, that

Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples

because to me, justice flows *from* rights and duties, which stem from our foundational values. Our foundational values tell us what matters to us and, through reasoning, lead to certain rights and duties. Through the coherent application of those rights and duties, we achieve justice. I do understand why the encyclical inverts that, though, because “justice”, as you’ve pointed out, is usually a much clearer north star for us humans than “rights and duties”. The encyclical uses “justice” to refer to a set of foundational values that are important to this Pope (universal human dignity being the chief one), because it’s trying to convince people to adopt those values.

The reason why Trump and others like him have been able to co-opt the concept of justice is that they haven’t really co-opted it at all. They’ve just forced it to operate according to their own warped and self-serving foundational values. It’s nothing new. So the problem, as I see it, isn’t so much our ability to act justly, but our foundational values. And, unfortunately, we can only assert those. Our entire moral and ethical systems will always flow from unprovable basic assertions, eg: truth is good, suffering is bad, life is sacrosanct, etc. Attempts to demonstrate the natural validity of foundational values through logic or proof have always failed, valiant as they may have been (just ask Kant). Our values will always be a tiny flame that we have to shield from the cold darkness of the inanimate.

I’m not religious, and I get the sense that most people in the Kottke.org-reading community aren’t either. But there is one important lesson we could all learn from the religious, in my view, which is that we should treat our basic values like gods. We should stop asking where they come from or why they’re valid, and become more comfortable asserting and defending them (if necessary, by force). The idea that all living beings have inherent and sacred dignity is absolutely a good thing, and if we believe in it we shouldn’t feel the need to justify it. We should instead *glorify* it, strive to apply it coherently whenever we have to make difficult decisions, and fight tooth and nail whenever it’s challenged. That’s how we get to justice.

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