The notion of apocalypse has different shades of meaning and nuance, depending on its context. Secular culture has long assumed it is the peculiar foolishness of religious folk to believe in prophecies of a radically different kind of future. And yet it can be those most detached from traditional religious faith who embrace the most nonsensical apocalypses. For example, we have Elon Musk and his promises to “occupy Mars,” despite the place being a death sentence for humans, or fellow entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who suggests clients can “live forever” through dietary torture and blood transfusions.
No sort of apocalyptic nonsense is quite so pervasive today, however, as what comes from artificial intelligence obsessives—boosters and doomers alike.
It is worth revisiting these prophecies at this moment, because there is a subtext in Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” that confronts Silicon Valley’s dueling false apocalypses, while not dignifying their ideas with too much mention.
Pope Leo does take the time, at least, to rebuke the boosters’ apocalyptic vision: the “transhumanist” and “posthuman” aspirations of many A.I. boosters, who promise that “superintelligence” will free us from every problem we can imagine. “The human desire for fullness of life,” he writes, “is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness.”
The boosters meanwhile prophesy that the A.I. data centers’ energy and water consumption will be outweighed by their finding the solution to climate change, along with a cure for cancer, world peace and the end of the tedium of labor. Some subset of this may be true, in part; the utopian aspirations are ridiculous. To be human is to know limits, and to invent anything is to know unintended consequences.
The other A.I. apocalypse, that of the doomers, may seem harder to dismiss. In Vatican officials’ dialogues with A.I. insiders, especially their conversation partners at Anthropic, they surely heard a great deal about “existential risk.” This is shorthand for “the A.I.s will kill us all,” by way of synthesizing perfect bioweapons or engineering a nuclear holocaust or turning the planet into paper clips. Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded on the premise of preventing such outcomes. But the encyclical barely gives these scenarios mention.
Both the booster and doomer apocalypses are power plays. They claim that the single-minded pursuit of A.I., or the single-minded anxiety about A.I.’s risks, is more important than anything else. Meanwhile, we are told that actual experiences of A.I. hiring discrimination or A.I. carbon emissions or A.I. shadow work or A.I. layoffs should seem comparatively unimportant. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel has lately been on a speaking tour to warn about the Antichrist, which may be a convenient way to distance his reputation from the role his A.I. company Palantir is playing in abetting immigrant concentration camps and the mass murder of Iranian civilians.
Imaginary nightmares enable actual harm. As the pope warns, “while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities.”
Although the encyclical doesn’t use the word apocalypse explicitly, it offers one of a different sort. But this revelation, or unveiling—that’s what the word apocalypse means—isn’t one made out of Babel-esque or Baal-like technologies.
The secularized apocalypse is nothing new
When the previous Pope Leo penned his encyclical “Rerum Novarum” in 1891, confronting the demons of the Industrial Revolution, secular apocalypses were swirling around as well.
The first was what the economist Joseph Schumpeter would later celebrate as “creative destruction”—the capacity of entrepreneurs to produce value in the world by smashing what came before them. Yes, the factories had broken families and historic ties to land, but aren’t their products wonderful? Allow the process to continue, and capitalism will deliver phenomenal benefits that are worth all the hardship along the way.
On the other side was the promise of a workers’ revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This would usher in a paradise on earth through the proper knowledge of, and action upon, material conditions. Study those conditions, and act when the time is right, and the science of history will take care of the rest.
The philosopher Karl Löwith recognized these tales as secularized cribbing of Christian prophecy. They borrow the idea of a new heaven and a new earth but without the parts about God or love—which, in the Christian version, are actually the whole point.
“Rerum Novarum” did not mention apocalypse either, but it saw through the secular ones on offer. It also suggested a Christian alternative: the simple and astonishing revelation that all people—including those factory workers—are made in the image of God and deserving of dignity.
Pope Leo’s apocalypse
The present Pope Leo does not speak loudly about the apocalypse, ranting about Antichrists or the Rapture. But apocalypse is in his encyclical, and—as for his predecessor—it lives within the daily work of Christian life, not in some exotic sci-fi to come.
“The civilization of love,” Leo writes, “will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” The paragraph ends by introducing some of the encyclical’s most powerful language: the call to “disarm.” This is an apt term: Turning humans into datapoints, and then increasingly arming drones and thugs with those datapoints, is integral to the business model of A.I. companies.
Pope Leo is suggesting something quite significant here: Most Christians and their secular copycats have been misunderstanding apocalypse all along. It is not about one technology, one Antichrist or one revolution, whether against the Roman Empire or against capitalism. It is no particular event or particular anything. He writes, “Elevating any single dimension of human existence to an absolute is always a mistake.”
The apocalypse of Pope Leo is in fact many apocalypses—akin to what the theologian Catherine Keller has called a “counter-apocalypse.” You think it is coming from the sky, but it is actually right in front of you, in a person or a crisis, an opportunity or a failure. These are the revelations that matter right now; they are the unveiling. They are how Christ comes again, at least for the moment.
The encyclical ends on the Magnificat prayer, and while reflecting on it Pope Leo makes the here-and-now-ness of the Christian apocalypse clear with his italics: “God has already shown the strength of his arm; he has already scattered the proud, cast down the mighty, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed.”
“Magnifica Humanitas” revolves around two biblical stories: the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s reconstruction of Jerusalem. There is a lot to unpack in these, but allow me one more point. Babel is a new construction, reaching toward heaven and some planned-for triumph. But the story of Nehemiah and Jerusalem—the story he asks us to imitate—is about repair, involving many repairers, each using their particular skills. Repair tends to what is already among us. And whenever we are tempted to be astonished by some marvelous prophecy, about A.I. or anything else, the encyclical warns: Don’t lose sight of what is already here.
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