On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.
"In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."
Artificial intelligence is never neutral; humanity now faces a forced choice between building a new Tower of Babel — a technocratic order that concentrates power, hides exploitation, and reduces persons to data — or rebuilding Jerusalem brick by brick through the Church's social principles: dignity, common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and justice.
The arguments load-bearing for the rest of the document. Each numbered claim is one Leo would not give up.
Themes counted by string-search across the 245 paragraphs of body text. Useful for orientation, not a substitute for reading.
Each card pairs an arguing headline with the mechanism Leo proposes; the Evidence line links to the paragraphs on vatican.va where the argument is established.
Leo grants that technology is not in itself evil and has improved human life across centuries. But in practice, every tool 'takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it,' so ethical discernment cannot stop at use — it must interrogate design, training data, and the vision of the human person embedded inside.
Babel — a single language, single technology, single direction, no reference to God — is Leo's diagnosis of the technocratic paradigm: a grandiose project of self-affirmation that sacrifices dignity for efficiency and produces dispersion, not unity. Nehemiah, by contrast, is the model: shared responsibility, walls rebuilt brick by brick, families assigned sections.
The major drivers of development today are private, often transnational, actors with resources surpassing many governments. Leo treats this as a structural shift requiring Social Doctrine to update: subsidiarity now constrains not the State but the major economic and technological actors who set the conditions for access, visibility, and economic opportunity.
The universal destination of goods, traditionally applied to land and resources, now extends to patents, algorithms, digital platforms, infrastructure, and data. Concentrating these in a few hands produces a new structural injustice; data 'is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few.'
Even the developers of current AI systems possess only a limited understanding of their internal representations and computational processes; the system 'grows' within a framework rather than being directly designed. This epistemic opacity makes accountability harder and demands both deeper scientific research and stricter moral discernment before, not after, deployment.
AI systems do not undergo experiences, possess a body, mature through relationships, or know love, work, friendship, or responsibility from within. They simulate empathy and communication, which is precisely the danger: 'when words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance,' and users may gradually lose the desire for real human connection.
Automated systems that decide credit, employment, services, or reputation 'do not know compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change.' Cloaked in a veneer of neutrality, they make injustice unappealable; political responsibility and even simulated empathy disappear, and exclusion becomes invisible.
Movements that treat the human as something to be perfected or surpassed make it easier to accept that some lives are less worthy — opening the door to 'necessary sacrifices' of the vulnerable in the name of optimization. The authentic 'more than human' is not technological enhancement but grace; humans flourish through limits, not despite them.
Public discourse is degraded when those who command technological resources can decide 'the truth about humanity, the world, the meaning of existence, the family and even God.' Without a shared commitment to factual truth, democracy slowly slides toward totalitarianism — Leo quotes Hannah Arendt on the ideal subjects of such regimes being those for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.
Every 'seemingly immediate and flawless' AI response rests on a long chain: data labelers and content moderators (often young women, often handling disturbing material), and miners — including children — extracting rare earths in dangerous conditions. Calling this 'efficient' while concealing the exploitation contradicts human dignity at the root.
Autonomous weapons make war 'more feasible and less subject to human control,' lowering the threshold for force and dissolving moral agency into 'the machine.' Leo's non-negotiable: lethal decisions cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes — the chain of responsibility must remain identifiable, verifiable, and human.
Without prejudice to strict self-defense, the just-war theory 'has all too often been used to justify any kind of war' and is now outdated; humanity possesses better tools — dialogue, diplomacy, forgiveness. Leo names the military-industrial complex, the arms-market profit motive, and tactical-nuclear miniaturization as forces normalizing what should be unthinkable.
Leo inverts the standard framing: it is not idealism but Realpolitik — resignation to war's inevitability, the belief that 'might makes right' — that is irresponsible. Authentic realism identifies interests, fears, and power dynamics precisely in order to change them, through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, and patient negotiation.
Not everyone has equal power to make a difference, but 'no one is without responsibility.' Each person has their own area of action where they choose to fuel the mentality of force (even through indifference, cynicism, or lies) or preserve the mindset of peace. Five paths: disarm words, build peace through justice, take the victims' perspective, cultivate healthy realism, revive dialogue and multilateralism.
Five chapters bracketed by an introduction and conclusion. Paragraph ranges shown so you can jump in below.
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