The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.
Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor, Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.
Addressing the 2024 summit of G-7 leaders, he called AI “fascinating and terrifying”. He said humanity faced a future without hope if “choices by machines” replaced people’s decisions about their lives.
In January this year, the Vatican warned in a document on AI that even if the technology had constructive uses, a handful of tech companies could gain wealth and power at the expense of the many. Militaries might race to develop autonomous weapons, lacking in human judgment or morality. Children risked growing up in a dehumanized world, with chatbots as their guides.
Margherita Stancati, Drew Hinshaw, Keach Hagey & Emily Glazer
Is this how the Butlerian Jihad begins in our timeline?
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune
I have pointed out multiple times Dune’s foresight and continued relevance in the modern world, and this generative AI moment touches on the book’s themes more forcefully than anything else before. Very timely how this tale received fresh public interest through the recent adaptation, even though Denis Villeneuve hardly touched on the book’s deeper meanings. To my surprise, the HBO series Dune: Prophecy leans harder into the weirder and more profound aspects of Dune (hopefully I’ll get around to writing a full review at some point), although it presents the struggle against the machines as a full-blown Terminator-style war, following Brian Herbert’s unwelcomed changes to his father’s work.
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