Since the publication on May 25 of the latest encyclical letter by the current Pope, Leo XIV, there have been a myriad of reactions in the press, mostly positive, to this document. In case the whole document was too cumbersome to read, the Holy See also provided a letter of presentation summarizing the most relevant points and terms (among them the much celebrated “disarmament of AI”), and even a ten-bullet point summary to be distributed among members of the Catholic Church. In truthiness, there is little most people would not agree with: inequality is growing and it is bad, our younger generations seem stultified (alas!, that wonderful nostalgia of the elderly who remember always a rosy past!), some people are getting unbelievably rich with our data, and nobody seems to be able to control any of this.
Anyone working with artificial intelligence (that wonderful oxymoron of our time) has been hearing all this for years. Many of us have been explaining this in our classes for as many years: yes, the crypto-bros exist because they trade with a commodity that we supply for free – our data – in exchange for software and content that we then use, sometimes – but not always – to waste our time and sometimes our dignity, and to get us hooked.
It is as if we cultivated the opium poppy for free, gave it away to traders, who then process it and sell it back to us for a lot of money. The profit margin is huge; it is basically all profit with little investment. This is what we have been doing with our data for decades, in exchange for social platforms where participation has become a must, and appliances that promise to make our lives easier. So, we sold our souls for nothing and now we are waking up, slowly. In the meantime, we have realized, once more, that the only unquenchable capacity of human beings is not love, but stupidity.
The quest for domination over the weak is not a novelty of the AI era.
The words of Leo XIV resonate throughout the world for many reasons: because they seem to imply an antagonism with the current occupant of the White House – one of most divisive leaders of our time – because people always like Davids confronting Goliaths, and because he addresses an issue that few people understand but many fear.
There are indeed many angles that Catholic theology could provide in analyzing artificial intelligence, but Robert Prevost has chosen the Social Doctrine of the Church to center the discussion. His understanding, and the idea that permeates the entire document, is that artificial intelligence is making our lives more miserable while benefiting only a few in the process. To explain this, he uses two biblical images: the Tower of Babel, as narrated in the Book of Genesis, and the reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, as narrated in the Book of Nehemiah. The first signifies self-interest and affirmation without God, the second implies cooperation for the greater good and the glorification of that same God. For Leo XIV, AI is a social question because it is our current Babel and it is damaging us as human beings.
As a historian, I find that difficult to believe. Humans have been mistreating humans since the first fights in the caves. They have also been helping one another since exactly the same time. The quest for domination over the weak is not a novelty of the AI era. It has always existed, and once we have fully incorporated AI into our daily lives, as we have incorporated many inventions before it, new forms of power will emerge and be used to enslave fellow humans – whether that was their original intent or they were manipulated to do so hardly matters. Anyone working with algorithms knows that algorithms can be trained, and that the person who programs an algorithm to grant or deny health care to someone could have trained the same algorithm with another purpose. It is the purpose, not the algorithm, that is to blame – and the purpose, for the moment, is still human.
So Leo XIV does not like the crypto-bros who exploit our weakness and stupidity and who have created a Leviathan that nobody seems to really know how to disarm. He makes the comparison with nuclear energy. But that comparison is fallacious in all aspects but one: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not caused by nuclear energy, they were caused by President Truman who gave the order to drop the bomb. The only big difference is that, contrary to the technology developed and sponsored by national governments – who invested in controlling the world and kept it secret from the broader public – this new technology has been fed by us with our data, and the consequences are also felt by all of us.
It is a different development model. And one that I am not sure people would agree to dispense with. If tomorrow, we all suddenly decided to close all the apps that move our data, the tyranny would stop. Of course we are not going to do that. Because, we have also realized that we like many of the things that AI brings to our lives. For a start, it has democratized content and access like never before, and not only in Eurasia, but also in the so-called Global South. It facilitates daily tasks for many and, despite what the Pope says, it contributes daily to communication and employment of millions of people. AI is a tool. It is not the moral behind the tool.
There are many other things that Pope Leo repeats that resonate with the apocalyptic tone of the last few years, but as I was reading through the forty pages of his encyclical letter, I began to feel I had read this before. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, at the time Abbot of Sponheim wrote his treatise De laude scriptorium (Praise of scribes), in which he praised the many advantages of copying a text in a scriptorium, in contrast to using one of those modern printing presses. Only a few years after his treatise, the expanding republic of letters carried with it the rise of the reading public, and that, in turn, led to what Elizabeth L. Eisenstein identified years ago as “the displacement of pulpit by press.” The Church, all churches, were quick to react to this new tool of spreading and communicating information. For the first time in history, they had lost control of the message, which was now available to anyone who had enough funds to pay a printer to get his work published, as Cervantes did with Don Quixote.
The Catholic Church labeled silent individual reading as dangerous, individualistic, even peccaminous, and reacted, like all other denominations of Christianity, by publishing Indexes of Forbidden Books, imposing the necessity of the “nihil obstat imprimatur” (“to be printed without objections”) and, in the case of the Catholic Church, by granting to the Inquisition the inspection of private libraries in order to try to control the message arriving to society. Miguel Delibes’ last novel, The Heretic (1998) describes the situation perfectly well. The result was that more people died in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe by order of Christian tribunals, not only Catholic, accused of writing, printing, or owning forbidden books than accused of any other crime, including witchcraft and infanticide. The enemy to be defeated had been clearly identified, and the reasons provided (dangers of exposition, dehumanization, sowing of chaos) were strikingly similar.
In their efforts to control messaging, though, all Christian churches in Europe and its colonies counted on the unconditional support of the governments to which they served or with whom they collaborated. And if we believe Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962) and others, it was precisely thanks to the arrival of the printing press that medieval societies could evolve into modern participating democracies. It is no coincidence that dictators who aspire to remain in power attack, first and foremost, the freedom of the press – both the media itself and the means, as George Orwell magnificently imagined in 1984.
In fact, physical control of the printing presses became almost an obsession in early modern Europe. And in historical terms, this was so until relatively recently. For example, until only a few decades ago, as Benjamin Nathans describes in his Pulitzer Prize-winner To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, Soviet dissidents soon realized that in order to transmit their messages, they could only copy them by hand – samizdat (‘self-published’) – in order to avoid the omniscient eyes of the KGB.
So Pope Leo XIV is, of course, correct in denouncing the inequality and dehumanization that AI might bring, because the world itself is unequal, inhuman and brutally cruel to the weakest and most vulnerable. The Pope mentions the word ‘justice’ 83 times (17 of which are the combination ‘social justice’) and ‘rights’ 37 times. He mentions ‘women’ 21 times, sometimes in statements as clear and comforting as “Social movements, communal ideologies and grand political proclamations in favor of a population are worthless unless they lead to the flourishing of persons — men and women — with their inalienable rights.” and “Recognizing that every man and woman possesses an inalienable dignity, together with rights that no human power can betray or nullify, requires us to shape the way we live together, including our economic and political choices, and the makeup of our cities.”
And then I remember I am reading a document by the head of a religious organization that forbids women access even to the lowest levels of social or hierarchical responsibility or visibility, that forces its members to choose between a fulfilling family life and poorly paid service to that same organization, and, as someone educated in the conscious reading of the Gospel, I cannot help but hear the words of Matthew (Matthew 7.3) and Luke (6.41) echoing in my mind: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
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