Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…The Pope takes on AI…Microsoft becomes the latest company to “toll gate” some of its systems…OpenAI solves an Erdös problem (for real)…and that sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance in JD Vance’s head.
When the American-born Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope last year, he chose Leo as his papal name in part to pay homage to the legacy of Pope Leo XIII. The previous Pope Leo presided over the throne of St. Peter in the late 19th Century, during a time of rapid technological change and economic upheaval due to the Second Industrial Revolution. He is best known for his 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” (Latin for “Of New Things”) which spoke about the plight of the working class and the moral obligations that the owners of capital and corporations had towards the workers and the poor. It is considered the foundational document of Catholic social doctrine. Well, now the current Pope Leo XIV has issued the first encyclical of his papacy, one that is explicitly intended to echo his predecessor’s concern for the plight of the worker, updated for the age of AI.
Called “Magnifica Humanitas” (or “Magnificient Humanity,” in English), Leo’s “AI encyclical,” which was published Monday, weighs in at 42,300 words in its English version (or about half the length of many books.) At its core, the encyclical is a plea that AI should be used as a tool for human empowerment—rather than disempowerment—and that human dignity must remain fundamental even in a world where more and more processes are handled by AI.
