Pope Leo XIV can bring Catholic social teaching into the A.I. age

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII began the church’s tradition of social encyclicals with his “Rerum Novarum” (“Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”). Leo XIII wrote in the context of a world whose economy and politics had been upended by an Industrial Revolution that began in Europe and North America and would continue to sweep across the world. Large numbers of people had already relocated from small farming communities to swelling industrial cities, and many crossed countries and oceans out of economic necessity. The new industrial economy created wealth unseen in previous epochs, but those in factory, mine or field saw little of the fruit of their labors.

Industrialization held great promise for prosperity and health but also great risks of exploitation and the destruction of communities. In words that could also be applied to our own technological and economic moment, Leo XIII wrote: “The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes…” There is no topic, he wrote, “which has taken deeper hold on the public mind.”

With the benefit of hindsight, we can recognize both the benefits of that first industrialization, such as higher standards of living, and the costs, such as uneven wealth distribution and environmental destruction.

Today we bear witness to an Industrial Revolution that may be as momentous as the first, if not more so. In his first address to the College of Cardinals after his election, Pope Leo XIV echoed the previous Pope Leo to describe “another industrial revolution” and to note “developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

Like the factories of the 19th century, the artificial intelligence revolution holds both promise and peril. The first Industrial Revolution upended the lives of manual laborers and craft workers. The A.I. revolution seems headed most directly for knowledge workers and creatives (as screenwriters and actors argued in their 2023 strikes). The precise impact is impossible to foresee.

The written word, once the exclusive domain of the human mind, is now increasingly the domain of machines. Video and audio, too, are more and more frequently A.I.-generated. Professions that long commanded social esteem as learned or creative vocations now seem vulnerable in the face of the machine. In his recent message to representatives of the media, Pope Leo lamented the “Tower of Babel” of modern, technology-driven communications. He went on to observe that A.I. holds the potential to either exacerbate or ameliorate the breakdown of true dialogue in social communications.

In the face of new challenges, Pope Leo asks the cardinals and the whole church to call upon the “treasury of her social teaching.” The church’s social tradition, at its heart, is a reflection on the principles required to build a just society so that all might flourish. Calling upon the tradition of the church in novel circumstances requires great scholarship and reflection over time. But even in these early days of the A.I. revolution, a lesson from the first Industrial Revolution holds firm. Catholic social teaching instructs us to look beyond machinery to people.

The course of technological development is notoriously difficult to predict. More importantly, technology and its deployment are neither a law of nature nor destiny. The future technological economy will be built on human ingenuity and human choices, much like the economy of the Industrial Revolution.

In the first Industrial Revolution, human beings could figuratively and literally disappear into the mechanism of industry. There was more attention paid to the great steam-powered machines and their wealthy owners than to the people required to make them run. A single worker had negligible power to negotiate for decent conditions in an enormous factory. The dignity and voice of these workers, many of whom only recently changed city or even country and language, were lost.

“Rerum Novarum” affirmed the right to a collective voice through organized labor. The voice of one worker can be ignored; the voices of many cannot. Natural justice is prior to the laws of economics. Workers have the right to be paid decently and to be asked to consent to their working conditions even when the market logic would allow for minimal wages in exploitative social contexts. The market economy and machinery of industry exists for human beings, not human beings for the market economy and machinery of industry.

The A.I. revolution risks making workers disappear into vast caches of data rather than into the factories of old.

A.I. is a blanket term covering a variety of technologies; the most talked about are Large Language Models, or L.L.M.s, which drive programs like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. These models are extraordinary achievements of human ingenuity that bring together centuries of scientific and engineering knowledge. L.L.M.s are “trained” on vast amounts of human data and then fine-tuned by teams of human beings; they encode within themselves billions of human voices, texts and images. Yet the voice of the machine can obscure rather than amplify these many voices. To borrow from the philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor, these systems “mirror” human knowledge and creativity back to us, often distorted, while erasing individuals and communities.

The first Industrial Revolution supplanted many professions and provided many new forms of gainful employment, though not without a long struggle for recognition of the dignity of many new forms of work. Through all this, the treasure of the church’s teaching is that the human being is made in the image and likeness of God. No machine, however impressive, is greater than this divine image.

The realignment of work of the A.I. revolution is in its early days. Like Leo XIII in 1891, we are in the midst of a revolution, not only technical but also social and political, and its outcome is uncertain. Like Leo XIII then, Leo XIV now calls on Catholics and all people of good will to focus on the human being made in the divine image, the foundation of Catholic social teaching.