AI, Papal Encyclicals, and Eternal Hubris: Why Magnifica Humanitas Misses the Mark

Reading around in Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s new encyclical on “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” I couldn’t help but recall Dr. Johnson’s comment about Paradise Lost. He found a lot to admire in that sprawling opus. But Johnson also noted that “none ever wished it longer than it is.” Magnifica Humanitas weighs in at more than 40,000 words. It is inspired by, and in some respects modeled on, Rerum novarum, Leo XXIII’s 1891 encyclical on society’s duties to the poor. At some 14,000 words, that earlier “circular” seems almost sonnet-like by comparison.

Magnifica Humanitas is not only long. It is also prolix. Like the eponymous river in Turkey, it meanders. Its ostensible subject—the threat that artificial intelligence may pose to human flourishing—is counterpointed throughout by nuggets of politically correct sentiment. There is a lot about “economic injustices and the climate crisis” in this expostulation. Also migrants. He quotes with approval Pope Francis’s insistence that we view migrants “not simply as a problem to be managed but as a living image of the People of God on the move.” Leo is also against war, you will be relieved to hear, but he writes as if war were a modern invention. “Today,” he writes, “we are witnessing a real paradigm shift  . . . with a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics, while the very ethical principles that had previously limited its use are being eroded.” No-one tell Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan,  Sherman, Patton, or–well, open a history book. In brief, Magnifica Humanitas betrays a fair quota of naïveté. Mirabile dictu, one of the stars of the show is the United Nations, which Leo mentions several times, always with admiration.

I suspected at first that the encyclical was written by a committee. Its tone and rhetorical structure vary substantially from one section to the next. I wonder, though, whether there isn’t something to the naughty suggestion that this admonition about the dangers of AI wasn’t itself written with the help of AI.