The pope should have gone further on AI

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical warns that AI’s current trajectory threatens human dignity, but the pontiff failed to address the most consequential question of what purpose the technology should serve. The encyclical correctly notes that technology is never neutral, reflecting the values of its creators and financiers, yet it stops short of demanding a fundamental reorientation of the systems steering AI development. As AI reshapes communication, work, and warfare, the public debate remains narrowly focused on competition between labs rather than on ensuring the technology improves broad-based human welfare.

BOSTON — Artificial intelligence AI is reshaping how we communicate, access information, and work, how income and status are distributed, and even how we wage war. Yet the public conversation remains narrowly focused on the competition between AI labs or on abstract debates about the technology’s capabilities. Almost no one is asking what purpose AI ought to serve, or whether our current mindset, institutions, and control mechanisms are capable of steering the technology toward broad-based improvements in human welfare. It was therefore refreshing to see Pope Leo XIV weigh in on the issue with his first encyclical, which describes AI’s current trajectory as a profound threat to human dignity. As an economist who has long argued that technologically driven outcomes are matters of choice, not fate, I welcome his intervention. Leo is ahead of most commentators in pointing out that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” And yet, I worry that even he has not gone far enough on the most consequent