Rome Issues Its First Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence — and Warns of a "New Tower of Babel"

The Watchman’s Read

I am not Catholic, and Magnifica Humanitas is not my creed. But a watchman does not only read the friendly signs. When the largest religious institution on earth devotes the first major teaching of a pontificate not to a doctrine of the church but to a machine, the choice of subject is itself the message. Rome looked at artificial intelligence and reached, instinctively, for Babel — for the oldest story of humanity building a name for itself toward heaven, and for what came of it. That instinct is worth marking, because it converges with what these books have argued from the first page. The encyclical's sharpest warning is not about killer drones or lost jobs. It is about a subtler substitution: the temptation to see the human person as a product, and to accept an "enhanced" self as an improvement on the one we were given. That is the counterfeit precisely as Scripture frames it — not a frontal assault on the image of God, but an offer to upgrade it. The same hand that was promised in the Garden that we would be as gods is extended again, now wearing a lab coat. And in a detail almost too on-the-nose to invent, the document was unveiled with one of the architects of frontier AI standing in the room — the altar and the laboratory, for a moment, sharing a podium.