Pope Leo XIV's encyclical isn't about artificial intelligence but about rights, inequalities, climate change and much more
Officially, yes, it addresses artificial intelligence and the Church's social doctrine. But read carefully, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, is something more unsettling: an indictment of the model underpinning the digital economy, and one that poses a question left open until the very end: at what human — and environmental — cost does the world we have built actually function?
Artificial intelligence "must be disarmed" — that is the central message from Pope Prevost. But it must also be cooled down, he explains: "Current AI systems require large amounts of energy and water, significantly affect carbon dioxide emissions and consume resources intensively," he writes. "As complexity increases, especially in large language models, so too do the needs for computing power and storage capacity, which rely on an assemblage of machines, cables, data centres and energy-hungry infrastructure."
This is not an abstract call for sustainability, but rather an acknowledgement that the digital realm has a physical body, consumes real resources, and that such consumption falls disproportionately on those with the least voice. For this reason, the Pope says, it is essential to "develop more sustainable technological solutions to reduce the environmental impact and care for our common home." A direct echo of the ecological tradition opened by Francis with Laudato si', which Leo XIV takes up and carries into the debate on AI.
There is a passage in the encyclical that reads as a genuine social indictment, in which Leo XIV describes the hidden human chain behind our devices: "A significant part of the digital economy's functioning rests on the silent labour of millions of human beings, employed in low-visibility but essential tasks: data labelling, content moderation, model training. In many cases these are young people, mostly women, who work hard for minimal pay." And then, the starkest passage of all: "To this invisible toil is added that, even more brutal, of the extraction of the resources needed to produce the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some parts of the world, teenagers and children work in dangerous conditions crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are obtained. Bodies marked, mutilated, worn out so that the flow of computation does not stop."
A kind of digital neo-colonialism that concerns "entire territories, especially those with less geopolitical relevance and greater structural fragility," which "are traversed by a new logic of extraction: that of health flows, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic data." Data — or rather big data — are "the new 'rare earths' of power," gathered often "under the banner of aid, research or innovation." The conclusion is unequivocal: if peoples are not given back "not only the data that describe them, but also the ability to decide how they will be used, by whom and for whom," then "the digital era will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form."
On the question of inequality, too, Leo XIV eschews diplomacy. "A few have too much and too many have too little — that is today's logic," he writes. Global wealth has grown, he acknowledges, but "concentration in a few hands has intensified and imbalances have widened, both between countries and within the same country." Artificial intelligence, in this context, is not an automatic solution but an accelerator: "If the transformations are not governed with the prevention of further and new disparities as a priority objective, already at the design stage, technological progress automatically produces structural inequalities."
Believing that "new technologies will automatically benefit everyone," the Pope says, "means ignoring the evidence." He offers a concrete and painful example: during the pandemic, "scientific and technological advances, including in medicine, were not easily accessible to the vast majority of the population." While some regions were investing "in superfluous interventions or in dreams of individual enhancement that only a few can afford, in other parts of the world essential equipment to save millions of human lives was still lacking."
One of the encyclical's most concrete and far-reaching proposals concerns the ownership of data. Leo XIV asserts that it cannot be entrusted solely to private actors: data "are the fruit of many people's contributions and cannot be sold or entrusted to a few." What is needed, he writes, is "a creativity capable of managing them as one of the common or collective goods, in the logic of sharing." It is a position that aligns with some of the most advanced proposals in the international debate on digital governance. And one the Pope grounds in an ancient principle: the goods of the earth belong to the entire human family, not to whoever manages to claim them first. Today those goods also go by the names of algorithms, platforms and technological infrastructures. "When these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods and widens the gap between the included and the excluded."
There is a form of injustice that still receives little attention, but which Leo XIV pinpoints with precision: that of silent digital control. "When every gesture leaves traces — movements, purchases, relationships, preferences — a new power is created: that of profiling, predicting and shaping behaviour, often without people's full awareness." This power, the Pope writes, does not act only through explicit prohibitions; it acts "through the architecture of visibility: what is amplified or rendered invisible, what is rewarded or penalised, ends up shaping opinions and choices, generating conformism and self-censorship." A precise description of something many of us experience every day without recognising it as a form of conditioning.
Magnifica Humanitas, then, is not about artificial intelligence — or rather, not only: it ties the threads of algorithms to those of the climate crisis, inequality and human rights. Problems to be confronted not separately, with different ministries and separate budgets, but as facets of the same way of looking at the world: a gaze that measures the value of things, and of people, according to the efficiency they produce. Leo XIV does not merely ask that AI be disarmed; he also calls for the imbalances and inequalities that technological development can bring to be healed — when instead it could deliver nothing but benefits.
