After the Lord sent a great flood to rid the world of evil, people gathered in Babylonia and began baking bricks—a recent advancement. In those days all humans spoke the same language, and they used those bricks to build a tower that embodied their limitless ambitions. And so the Lord imposed a panoply of tongues, thereby deterring the creation of any new technology that might aspire to divine power and glory.

The Lord may have delayed such technologies, but he didn’t preempt them entirely. The Vatican’s recently released 250-page encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas—“magnificant humanity”—has been hailed as the first official Catholic document to wrestle with AI. But rather than deal strictly with its hazards, the letter, signed by Pope Leo XIV, has two overarching purposes: first, to defend humanity against those who have grown jaded about our shared nature and existence, and second, to warn society about the threats posed by the temptation to outsource human capabilities to computers. Championing not just human magnificence but human imperfection is a radical turn. The pope’s insight that much of our beauty arises from limitation rather than limitlessness is a crucial intervention in the age of AI.

Magnifica Humanitas is not a Luddite document. Rather, it follows in a long tradition of Christian critiques of dazzling technologies that nevertheless smuggle in dangerous risks. The Industrial Revolution, for example, greatly increased productivity but also catalyzed a new form of exploitation for the profit of a handful of capitalists—prompting William Blake to wonder, in his 1804 poem “Jerusalem,” whether the light of God had ever shone among “these dark satanic mills.”

Francis X. Rocca: Pope Leo’s unsettling vision of the AI future

AI raises similar questions. One of the pope’s most surprising arguments is his insistence that humanity is fundamentally good—not in spite of, but because of the things that make us unlike machines. “Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others,” he writes. “Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.” He worries about any willingness to allow the human powers of reason, creativity, compassion, and care for fellow people to be usurped by machines.

This concern arrives at a moment when any faith in human goodness, judgment, and ingenuity seems to be under assault. Some of the loudest voices in Silicon Valley sound conflicted as to whether humans have anything of value to offer at all. Last year Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, hesitated in a New York Times interview to answer the question of whether humanity ought to survive. He and other members of the tech-investor class have instead suggested that humans might be better off if we outsource more of our imperfect decision making—moral and otherwise—to superintelligent AI.

Their perspective tends to dismiss human limitations as liabilities, despite the fact that it is human imperfection that inspires compassion and reflection, and that lends great art its beauty. The literature created by AI is dull and devoid of any real poignance. (A chatbot might mimic Dostoevsky’s prose style, for instance, but it cannot see, as he did, how sin casts goodness in heartbreaking relief.) Perfection is inhuman, and pretensions to it are both doomed and misbegotten.

Such pretensions to perfection are partly what make AI dangerous. Pope Leo points out that the creators and users of AI are already allowing the technology to make moral decisions—such as by using algorithms to figure out who to hire, whether to fund surgeries, or where to target bombs. This withers people’s capacity to think through these problems on their own, and perhaps more worryingly places the ability to broadly influence these choices in the hands of those who train and control AI technologies. This means that the moral philosophies of tech gurus will steadily guide the moral decisions of ever more people as these technologies gain wider purchase in society.

The pope has not issued a decree to dispense with AI, nor a definitive ruling on whether it is good or evil. In fact, the document doesn’t consider AI particularly special, though its specific risks are novel and serious. Instead, the pope positions the technology as merely one in a long lineage of such technologies, dating from the Tower of Babel, which promise power and glory at the expense of human uniqueness. Homogeneity, efficiency, and productivity are not what human life is about: Our calling isn’t to operate like computers, but to do exactly what computers cannot, which is to love.