When Robert Francis Prevost selected the papal identify Leo XIV, it will have intended many stuff. There have been 13 Leos prior to him: The primary, Leo the Nice, used to be a fifth-century theologian who helped heal the doctrinal divisions amongst early Christians; Leo X, a member of the robust Medici circle of relatives, helped galvanize the Protestant Reformation together with his lavish way of life and sale of indulgences.
Two days after his election, the brand new pope affirmed the perhaps inference: that his identify used to be a tribute to the newest Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903. Much less evident, on the other hand, used to be what impressed his selection: the upward push of synthetic intelligence.
As the brand new pope advised the Faculty of Cardinals on Might 10, 2025, he used to be impressed via his namesake’s teachings about financial justice throughout yet again of radical technological exchange. Leo XIII carried out Catholic custom to the Commercial Revolution in a historical encyclical known as Rerum Novarum, which turned into the founding record of contemporary Catholic economics.
“In our own day,” Leo XIV mentioned, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
I’m a pupil of monetary idea round generation and faith, and so the invocation of the former Leo had instant resonance for me. What courses is the present pope drawing from his predecessor? What would Leo XIII say about AI?
Nineteenth-century teachings
Some may consider that the solution is a few more or less outright rejection. The Catholic Church has a now and again earned popularity for denouncing the trendy international in want of its centuries-old traditions.
One side of the reign of Leo XIII, who turned into pope in 1878, used to be an assault on fashionable individualism, which he denounced as “Americanism.” However his courting with modernity used to be a ways from merely rejecting it. Leo XIII used to be the primary pope captured on movie, as an example, and he blessed the digicam that recorded him.
Leo XIII used to be the primary pope to look on movie.
In Rerum Novarum, which seemed in 1891, Leo spoke back to the roiling struggles between Gilded Age capitalists and the economic employees they systematically exploited. The “teeming masses of the laboring poor” won “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself,” he wrote.
The Nineteenth-century pope refused to endorse both the capitalists’ wait-and-see promise of development or the communists’ eager for a dictatorship of the proletariat. As an alternative, he presented a imaginative and prescient that turned into the cornerstone of contemporary Catholic social educating.
Leo XIII’s prescription for the Commercial Revolution of his time used to be to include personal assets, just like the capitalists, however to unfold it out way more extensively amongst employees. Rerum Novarum contends it’s “just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor.” If employees transform householders, he defined, they may be able to have an element in stewarding the items of God.
Leo XIII’s writings have shaped the root of contemporary Catholic social idea.
L’Illustrazione Italiana by way of Wikimedia Commons
The pope additional known as for public coverage that might unfold wealth and tool within the business financial system via common possession: “The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.”
However for many of the international, Leo’s plea used to be forgotten within the capitalist-versus-communist Chilly Warfare.
Twenty first-century tech
These days, we inhabit but some other Gilded Age. Wealth inequality in the USA has reached identical ranges as in Leo XIII’s time, as soon as once more due to technological disruptions that funnel the advantages to a small elite. AI threatens to place the platform financial system on steroids, upending paintings with the bots that only some firms can come up with the money for to construct.
Coverage debates about AI have a tendency to be restricted to what the massive tech CEOs must or shouldn’t do. The Biden management used to be poised to enshrine a couple of robust firms because the arbiters of AI, handing them and the federal government energy to resolve what’s and isn’t moral. Now, the Trump management is pulling out the entire stops to compete with China. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vice President JD Vance, who’s Catholic, advised a big AI summit quickly after taking place of work. “It will be won by building.”
Channeling Leo XIII to confront the AI revolution, on the other hand, method having a look previous prevailing concepts, as he did in his time. His teachings recommend that the individuals who create and use AI must be those who actively personal and govern it.
This might take many bureaucracy. For example, already there are employees organizing to form how AI is deployed of their offices. In different contexts, cooperative companies reminiscent of Land O’Lakes have labored with farmer-owners to make use of the knowledge that farm machines produce to enhance their practices. Other folks do not need to be simply passive customers of AI gear; when they have got well-organized democratic energy via unions and co-ops, they may be able to make the generation extra responsible to them.
AI firms themselves can unfold possession and governance extra extensively. Fears in regards to the risks that robust AI may pose if it will get out of hand have already brought on some founders to undertake abnormal company buildings. Anthropic, the corporate in the back of the AI assistant Claude, is a public-benefit company, this means that that it may prioritize long-term social advantage above shareholder earnings. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is owned via a nonprofit – an association that has resisted efforts to show it right into a extra typical more or less corporate.
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, heart, speaks on a panel at an match about AI protection in 2024.
AP Picture/Jeff Chiu
However those buildings nonetheless think that AI’s long run must be within the palms of an aristocracy of industrial and technical elites. Leo XIII, alternatively, argued that everybody who participates in an undertaking must have a stake in it.
For AI, that would come with now not best corporate staff but in addition the customers who educate the fashions, the communities that percentage their water and tool with information facilities, the employees who mine the uncooked fabrics for high-performance chips, and the creators who give a contribution to the programs’ wisdom.
Early analysis has instructed that bizarre individuals are very involved in turning energy over to machines that they don’t but perceive. They see penalties of AI of their lives that engineers in Silicon Valley are much less prone to imagine, from racial discrimination to administrative center surveillance. Additionally, as a phenomenal tale via the science fiction author Cadwell Turnbull suggests, other people will most probably use and accept as true with AI extra in the event that they comprehend it is really responsible to them.
In January 2025, the Vatican launched a record calling for a “renewed appreciation of all that is human” within the age of AI. It warned towards what Pope Francis known as the “technocratic paradigm”: the mindset that provides up people’ position as stewards of God’s introduction and palms energy over to programs, whether or not they’re inventory markets or laptop techniques.
Via taking the identify Leo, I consider the brand new pope is suggesting one thing identical. The necessary query isn’t whether or not new applied sciences are just right or dangerous. What issues way more is whether or not we will be able to discover ways to percentage the duty of stewardship – whether or not we will be able to all be companions in what this new business revolution is making imaginable.
