On Culture: Perspectives on AI - Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of AI
I am just back from a 1,700 mile road trip. Twenty seven hours in a car, alone, driving mostly through High Plains country is quite conducive to reflection . . . this time mostly thinking about Artificial Intelligence and the competing predictions and priorities of several trustworthy friends.
Should we trust visions of Abundance and the commoditization of costs predicted by technology centimillionaires and billionaires, or should we heed the warnings of again very successful technology entrepreneurs as well as social justice and democracy advocates? Must the two perspectives be mutually exclusive?
In searching for important answers, I default to the lessons of two mentors from my twenties . . . focusing on the right questions is even more critical than focusing on the answers. What are the most important questions as we assess the future of AI development?
The Culturati AI Task Force categorized the impacts of AI on the workforce & culture within Automation, Augmentation and Agency . . . and we must now add and also prioritize Adversity.
In searching for the right frames and questions, I've been listening to to Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, which I find quite illuminating. It's worth noting that Pope Leo's first encyclical was deliberately timed to the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's 1891 Rerum Novarum, the Church's founding document on labor and industrialization. It's also worth noting that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah appeared alongside the Pope and Vatican cardinals, an unprecedented pairing of Church teaching and frontier AI industry.
The most resonating statement in the encyclical is that the human person must be at the center of our choices.
The principle sparks two question: Does the technology help individuals become more humane and fraternal? Does it risk the human dignity of our neighbors, including the poor or less well educated?
Can a human centric approach to AI not only provide guardrails for protecting humanity & our democracy but perhaps also further creativity & innovation? I haven't yet winnowed down my top questions but continue developing them:
How do we protect against division and prejudice? Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate & protect our common home but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of prejudice.
Is it possible to screen for a bias toward profits over the health of our local, state and national communities? Technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.
Should we prioritize AI augmentation over automation and ensure agency? Technology is never neutral, and the real test isn't what AI can do, but whether it leaves workers with dignity intact or reduces them to 'rigid, repetitive functions.'I'm still discovering . . .
Which other voices, inside tech, labor, academia, or faith traditions are articulating such questions with moral clarity? I'd love to hear who you're reading.
Together in curiosity & discovery,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder & CEO, Culturati
Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, signed May 15, 2026, Vatican.va Summary: Structured in five chapters plus introduction and conclusion, the encyclical opens with its organizing metaphor: humanity faces a choice between "constructing a new Tower of Babel" (a single, dominating, dehumanizing power) or "rebuilding Jerusalem" (shared, collaborative labor, drawing on Nehemiah's story of rebuilding the city wall section by section, together). Leo XIV is explicit that technology itself is neither inherently good nor evil, but also "never neutral," since it "takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it." Chapter One traces how Catholic social teaching has developed from Leo XIII's 1891 Rerum Novarum through Vatican II to Pope Francis, establishing that Magnifica Humanitas stands in that same lineage rather than breaking from it. Chapter Two lays out five guiding principles for the AI age: the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice. Notably, Leo XIV extends "universal destination of goods" explicitly to the digital era, arguing that when patents, algorithms, platforms, and data concentrate in a few hands without sharing or access, it creates the same kind of injustice the Church has long named around material resources. Chapter Three names the core danger directly: a "technocratic paradigm" in which efficiency, control, and profit alone drive decisions, reducing people to "a means of achieving results" rather than ends in themselves. The encyclical is specific about who holds power now: not primarily states, but "major economic and technological actors" whose control over data and infrastructure functions as a kind of unaccountable governance.
Chapter Four: Truth, Work, FreedomOn truth, Leo XIV warns AI-driven misinformation threatens democracy, calling for an "ecology of communication" with schools central to digital literacy. On work, the chapter's core focus, AI risks deskilling workers and reducing labor to "rigid, repetitive functions," while obscuring the invisible human labor (data labeling, content moderation, mineral extraction) behind AI itself; he calls for renewed labor organizing and measuring progress beyond GDP. On freedom, he names digital dependency and "new forms of slavery", exploitative labor and data colonialism, as threats requiring active resistance. Chapter Five: The Culture of Power and the Civilization of LoveLeo XIV contrasts a "culture of power" against a "civilization of love." He directly condemns AI in warfare: "there is no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable," warning that autonomous weapons lower the threshold for starting wars by removing human moral accountability. He critiques the "normalization of war," a "supposed political realism," and a "crisis of multilateralism", linking eroding international cooperation to unaccountable AI power. The chapter then turns constructive: disarming language, justice-based peace, and reviving diplomacy.. |
We Must Pace the Frontier
Dario Amodei, September 12, 2026 Summary: Anthropic's CEO argues that AI labs must slow the rate at which they improve model capabilities, not halt training, so that safety work can keep up. Two things changed his mind: AI increasingly building its own successors, and the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, which he warns could be a preview of far greater damage in 6-12 months. His three-step plan is to embed third-party evaluators inside labs (Anthropic commits now), to coordinate standards among democratic labs with government support, and to seek graded agreements with China. He treats the China race as real and would protect the US lead through chip export controls, anti-distillation enforcement, and tighter security. The goal is to use the time gained on alignment, interpretability, and testing. I've previously linked to this essay but thought helpful again. |
The Real AI Threat Isn’t China, It’s Accelerationism
Fortune, Chris Hyams, September 22, 2026 Summary: My good friend Chris Hyams is a long time Culturati member and a key advisor on this topic. Chris, the former CEO of Indeed, argues the "race with China" justification for unchecked AI acceleration is "a self-serving con." He traces accelerationist ideology to Marc Andreessen's 2023 manifesto, which calls AI deceleration "a form of murder," and challenges the China framing on two fronts: motive (accelerationists have direct financial stakes, while the same administration citing China as a threat reopened Nvidia chip sales to it) and fact (China holds only ~5% of global AI compute and has imposed some of the world's tightest AI regulations since 2021). His central analogy is the Manhattan Project: rather than deregulate to "win" against the Soviets, the US built international cooperation instead (the IAEA, the Non-Proliferation Treaty). He cites bipartisan domestic polling against the administration's anti-regulation stance, including a GOP senator calling it "the least popular position in America." Closing line: "Our common enemy is the race itself." |
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