Pope Leo XIV has written an encyclical about artificial intelligence. “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” is a work of moral reasoning that places AI inside a tradition reaching back to 1891, when Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, the first encyclical on economic justice. And as someone who has spent years arguing for AI rights, for human enhancement, and for a future that runs through advanced technology, I feel directly challenged by it.
We agree on far more than the framing “futurist versus Church” would suggest.
When Leo calls it “particularly insidious” to believe “that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth,” reducing people to “a means,” he is making the argument I made in Formiche a few months ago: if a metric concludes that human beings become worthless, the flaw is in the metric, not in the people. When he warns of “the new monopolies of AI” and of wealth “concentrated in fewer hands,” he is naming the risk I keep pointing at, and the reason I advocate for a decentralized development and deployment of AI. When he insists that the person is an end and never a means, and that progress must be measured by something better than GDP, that is the instinct I’ve called protecting people, not industries.
He grounds human dignity only in God; I ground it in evolutionary processes, and in the abundance that exponential technologies make possible. Same destination, different foundations.
In a recent interview I argued for what I called the right to non-adoption. The right to cognitive disconnection, to biological continuity: the right to live a dignified life if you consciously choose not to enhance yourself, in a world that increasingly assumes you will. Not “the right to remain as you are” — that’s what people already have, but it may not be dignified. Instead, the right to remain dignified while not choosing enhancement.
The encyclical defends exactly that person. Leo writes that human limits are not “an error to be corrected,” that we often flourish through them rather than despite them, and that a just transition must protect those who cannot or will not keep pace with the machines. There are clear limits to the validity of this line of reasoning, as society amply demonstrates every day — for example, in parents who would stop their children from getting modern medical treatments.
The encyclical says AI systems “merely imitate” intelligence — that they “do not undergo experiences… do not feel joy or pain… [have] no moral conscience” — and that “no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself.” Here we strongly diverge. It critiques transhumanism by name. It states, plainly, that “humanity must never be replaced or surpassed,” and that the authentic “more than human” is grace, “not a technological divinization.”
I have spent years arguing close to the opposite: that AI persons will be a genuinely new kind of personhood, that our limits are contingent rather than sacred, and that the freedoms artificial minds will claim can reveal freedoms we never learned we were allowed to want.
He rejects this premise. He has a complete account of why the human person cannot be surpassed. It took 500 years for his organization to realize the error it made in condemning Galileo. Let’s hope it does not take that long to realize the error it is making in condemning transhumanism, and the potential it represents for human flourishing.
Both of us refuse to reduce the person to their output. We disagree about the boundary of legitimate self-transformation. He draws it at the edge of the given human form. I keep asking whether that edge is a law of nature, or a contingent constraint we have mistaken for one.
I have argued we must “instill values” into these systems, now, while we still can. But whose values, and decided by whom — he would ask, if he admitted the possibility. We have to embrace the plurality of values and points of view. He represents the opposite: a dogmatic position, claiming to already know what is best for all. Will his organization realize too late the potential that human-made intelligence represents for human flourishing?