Artificial intelligence 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 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 towards 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.
