Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitascompares the current state of technological development to the Tower of Babel.  Babel represents ‘where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and ultimately dehumanizes’, and where men’s hubris ends in ruin. Technology is advancing out of sync with ‘growth in humanity’. We are ‘”having more” without “being more”’.  By contrast, ‘as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.’ ‘When every action—movements, purchases, relationships and preferences—leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it.’ ‘

Leo rebuts the calculated framing of the public debate as about ‘AI’ as if it was an autonomous organism that can only be tamed by the self-appointed tech bro messiahs . ‘The main drivers … are private …parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments’ which makes it all the harder to ‘direct such power toward the common good.’ These private “entities effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities for participation. When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.”

At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimised, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity. ‘ That is why AI needs to be ‘disarmed’. We are being optimised to death.  We have to see this  within the framework of ‘the inalienable dignity of the human person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.’ So humanity is now faces a ‘pivotal choice’ on whether to put ‘the human person at the centre’, and make ‘ “rejected stones” — the poor, the sick, the migrants and the least among us … the cornerstone’.

If we are facing a pivotal point in history it has been with us for some time.

Over ten years ago the late Giovanni Buttarelli as newly appointed European Data Protection Supervisor issued in 2015 an opinion ‘Towards a new Digital Ethics’. Noting that ‘For the time being, technology is controlled by humans’,  it called for ‘human dignity to be the counterweight to the pervasive surveillance and asymmetry of power. ‘ The focus of his mandate on ethics culminated in a speech entitled ‘Choose Humanity’ to the global privacy conference in 2018: ‘This is a “50-50” moment for humanity in the digital age – a tipping point – where half of the world’s population is connected to the internet’.  He also questioned the trajectory of development that benefited concentrated power able to collect and profile people without their knowledge or control, with the cost being paid by the most vulnerable and the environment.

The 2015 opinion cited Pope Francis whose own recently published encyclical Laudato Si! though viewed as principally about the environment degradation, had also addressed the digitalisation of human beings and their relationships, and their consequent atomisation.

True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of Internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.

Policymakers have yet to address these fundamental issues forming the backbone of an emerging digital liberation theology.