It isn’t about the bots. Not really.
Pope Leo XIV dropped his first encyclical this Monday. He titled it Magnifica Humanitas. On paper it sounds like a treatise on artificial intelligence. It frames itself around safeguarding the human person in this new digital era.
Look closer though. The hook is tech but the target is older. Much older. It’s about inequality. War. The slow rot of democracy. The way power keeps stacking up in hands that don’t give a damn about the rest of humanity.
Elite Control
The document is 200 pages long. Leo didn’t write it alone either. He presented it with Chris Olah from Anthropic. The argument is blunt. A small group building and governing tech can’t serve the public. It never could.
The Pope puts it plainly in the text. When power concentrates with the few it becomes opaque. Public oversight dies. Development gets distorted.
It creates dependency. Exclusion. Manipulation.
Every major tech shift amplifies those who already have money. Those who hold the data. Leo points out that these elites don’t just have power. They use it. They shape how we consume information. They nudge democratic processes. They steer the economy to benefit themselves.
“As with every major technological shift, AI trends to amplify the power of those already possessing resources.”
This drops just days after Trump paused on signing his own AI executive order. That order would’ve let the government check new models before launch. Reports say VC investor David Sachs talked him out of it. Former AI czar. Current profit seeker. Same pattern.
Leo wants oversight. But not the corporate kind. He wants the affected communities in the room.
He also calls for an end to the arms race. Stop chasing bigger algorithms and massive datasets for geopolitical dominance. It’s a lie anyway. Technical power doesn’t mean you have the right to rule. Disarm the assumption.
Old Problems, New Screens
Why are we surprised?
We’ve seen this movie. Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum back in 1891. The Industrial Revolution had the same problem. Concentrated power crushing the little guy.
You don’t even need to dig that far back.
Remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter? Remember how he wielded the platform during the election? Think about the hundreds of millions tech bosses pump into Super PACs. They’re fighting AI regulation with checkbook diplomacy. These patterns didn’t just inspire Leo’s writing. They are the writing.
The tech industry raises the stakes. But the players remain the same.
Truth is for Sale
Paolo Carozza gets it. He’s at Notre Dame Law. He sits on the Meta Oversight Board. He told TechCrunch what everyone is whispering. AI misinformation corrodes truth.
Deepfakes don’t just confuse us. They break the baseline for political reality.
The data harvesting goes deeper. It attacks cognitive freedom.
“AI-driven misinformation corrodes our capacity to recognize truth… posing fundamental challenges to cognitive freedom.”
We’re being manipulated. By algorithms owned by people who don’t need us. The Pope just said it out loud. The rest is just noise.
