Tech Things: The Pope has Some Thoughts - by theahura

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Tech Things: The Pope has Some Thoughts<br>OpenAI does Math. The Big Labs get into Consulting. SpaceX IPO, Mythos hype, Insta hacked, Chipotleai.

theahura<br>Jun 03, 2026

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At this point I think everyone reading this blog probably knows that I have a long standing interest in AI. If you don’t, it’s probably your first time, and you should hit the button below.<br>Button!

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Most people probably don’t know that I also have a long-standing interest in religious studies. I’m not particularly religious myself, mind you — I tend to swing between atheist and agnostic, in case it matters — but I have a lot of respect for religious contributions to philosophy, ethics, and culture. Reading religious texts is a great way to understand how entire civilizations organize themselves. And I also increasingly believe that some kind of faith is necessary to live a self-fulfilling life. Ethics is hard, personal responsibility for ethical choices is an immense burden. What a gift, to know what is moral or not based on the contents of a book or the teachings of an elder! It’s a shame that so many of my college-educated FAANG-employed friends never bothered opening the Quran or the Bible.<br>Anyway, this has been a particularly great week for me, because my two favorite hobbies randomly and unexpectedly intersected when the Pope released his encyclical on AI.1

Now bringing in my third favorite thing, Bojack Horseman.<br>Encyclicals have a long history, but you can think of them as letters to the public that outline the Catholic Church’s position on a subject. They’re not exactly the same as the word of God, but they are important entries into the long and storied Catholic philosophical tradition that includes Aquinas and Augustine, as well as Dante and Copernicus.<br>The encyclical on AI (officially called Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity) is a long document.2 It’s also, as you might expect, a nuanced document. If you were expecting a clear “AI is a force for good / evil”, you will be sorely disappointed. Leo has a fantastic grasp of the potential and risks of AI as a technology, and avoids the polarization that has plagued the discourse on basically everything.<br>One of the longest threads in the encyclical is on the question of what kind of technology AI will be, expressed through extended metaphor.<br>Will AI be like the Tower of Babel? Will it be an exclusionary project founded on the desire to surpass humanity? Will it be doomed to fail, to sweep away those who built it in a catastrophic fall rivaling the flood? Or will AI be like the walls of Jerusalem? Will it be a protective and defensive force that can shelter those who need it while encouraging the fulfillment of all mankind?<br>Despite being an encyclical about AI, the Pope is not particularly interested in AI as a technology. Technology does not have animating spirit. The ethical parameters of a piece of technology are defined by those who build it. What are their goals? What is their vision of the future?3 IMO, Magnifica Humanitas is less about AI and more about Silicon Valley.<br>The problem with AI is not AI. It is the transhumanism. Or the belief that money is a terminal indicator of worth. Or the belief that humans should be replaced by AI. It’s the culture, stupid.<br>92. In his Encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm [119] in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions. This makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.<br>94. The danger of humanity becoming a victim of its own achievements was already clearly recognized by Saint Paul VI, who warned that “the most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats and the most amazing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress, will in the long run go against man.” [121] For this reason, technological progress — valuable in itself — requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues. If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: “having more” without “being more.” In such a scenario, there is a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce. [122]<br>115. In an attempt to shed light on the cultural assumptions accompanying the ongoing digital revolution, I would now like to turn our attention to certain currents of thought that interpret progress as surpassing the human...