Antichrist ex machina

The Pope has declared a threat to human nature if AI cannot be brought under control. First Encyclical of Leo XIV

The Western Christian world is reading the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV - Magnifica humanitas ("Enchanting Humanity", but other translations are possible). On the one hand, it is clear that this is a “bomb”: the pontiff announces a threat to human nature itself if the world community does not manage to take artificial intelligence (AI) under ethical control. On the other hand, the encyclical is very voluminous - more than 200 pages and about 40 thousand words; even professional theologians have not yet mastered it. There is no official Russian translation yet, and the unofficial one presents only fragments. Nevertheless, let's try to figure out why the Holy See is alarmed and what it offers.

Disarm before God

The central idea of ​​Magnifica humanitas: it is necessary to “disarm” AI. In the narrow and broad senses. In a narrow way: to curb the AI ​​arms race, or more precisely, technologies that are already taking control of the situation on the battlefield today. In broad terms, it is to wrest AI from the control of global supercorporations, which can replace traditional states, and to take total control of human behavior, his needs, thoughts, passions, and emotions. In a word, to dehumanize a person, turning him into a slave of AI, with which, of course, purely technically, the human brain cannot compete. And it is not a fact that these forces will turn out to be highly moral and will care about preserving the integrity of human nature as the crown of creation. A fashionable trend in modern post-Christian culture is the idea of ​​man as an “evolutionary mistake” and the ability of super-AI to correct this mistake...

Pope Robert Francis Prevost explained the choice of his name - Leo - with his intention to continue the course of Leo XIII (reigned 1878-1903), the author of the great encyclical Rerum Novarum (New Apparitions), which laid the foundations for the social teaching of the Catholic Church. Just as Leo XIII warned about the threats of the technical revolution, transnational capitalism and the transformation of man into a cog in technological chains, so

Leo XIV calls for protecting humans from the enslavement of AI, so that the unique personality of each person does not dissolve in the facelessness of a machine algorithm.

Just a month after his enthronement, in June last year, Pope Prevost outlined “harnessing AI” as his priority when addressing participants in the Second Rome Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Then he first announced the “transformation of reality” that occurs in the minds of people, primarily young people, who become dependent on AI.

Such dependence, Leo XIV said then, “prevents our youth from the path of maturity and true responsibility.” The format of quick and uncritical access to gigantic amounts of information, which neural networks provide today, does not form an intellectual culture, threatening the freedom, identity and ethical guidelines of a person, which are incomprehensible and unknown to AI. Dependence on AI in general gradually deprives a person of the ability to distinguish truth from lies, since neural network algorithms operate only on massive amounts of data and are not concerned with finding the truth. The Pope then proclaimed that only the subordination of the AI ​​sphere to ethical control could save humanity and humanity.

The Catholic Church is trying to promote its own chatbot, Magisterium AI, which answers questions based on the text of Holy Scripture and church tradition. The temptation that arises in this case to “mechanize” religion is no less than the danger of the general “dehumanization” of humanity through submission to AI algorithms. This “machinization” can be clearly seen in the examples of “virtual priests ” and “Athos prayers ”, which are generated by AI and posted on YouTube channels. Beautiful, blissful, but absolutely artificial.

Appeal to the state

The main challenge to which Leo XIV seeks an answer in the encyclical is the threat of AI domination over humans, “reflashing” human thinking and behavior with the logic and functionality of neural networks.

Dad stipulates that he is not an enemy of technological progress and sees a lot of advantages of AI, which in itself is morally neutral. Another thing is that the owners of the corporations that control AI products, those who “create, finance, regulate and use them,” fill neural networks with their own ethical content, that is, their passions and vices. The pontiff sees a way out in removing such a great technological heritage of humanity from the control of a narrow circle of corporations that strive for their pragmatic goals, and transferring this control... to states.

Frankly, looking at some of them, it doesn't seem like this solution would be much better than corporate control. Later in the encyclical, the pope himself seems to acknowledge this problem: some countries are “slipping into a violent culture of power, where peace is no longer seen as a responsibility to be assumed, but only as a fragile space between conflicts.”

After the start of US military action against Iran, Leo XIV angered Trump with his statement: “God does not hear the prayers of those who make war.” But the author of the encyclical, it seems, still hopes for the preservation of “the state in the good sense of the word,” without including regimes capable of starting wars.

The pope returns to the military use of AI again and again in the text, illustrating the main dangers of “technology without ethics.” “There is no algorithm capable of making war morally acceptable,” Leo XIV responds to apologists for a “high-tech war” in which robots fight, thereby avoiding human casualties. “Any technology,” he writes, “that makes it easier to strike without seeing the enemy’s face lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”

The experience of the last four years, alas, shows that the Holy See has too romantic ideas about the influence of the “face of the enemy” on the moral experiences of a serviceman.

Leo XIV calls on governments to “create an appropriate legal framework” for AI, and civil society, scientific and human rights institutions to provide “independent oversight, education and training for users.” It turns out that we are talking about “regulating” this area, about strengthening the role of the state, which is not in harmony with the image of a liberal pope.

Mobilization notes are also heard in the pope’s contrast of the images of Jerusalem and Babylon. In the context of AI, the “Tower of Babel” refers to an attempt by human efforts to “restart creation”, to create a new reality without the help of God the Creator. If you believe the Bible, such attempts are doomed to failure, but in the words of Leo XIV there is a real alarm: if the uncontrolled development of AI is not stopped, this time the Tower of Babel will be built, and this is tantamount to the coming of the Antichrist. As an alternative to Babylon, the pope offers Jerusalem, for the construction of which in the 5th century BC the prophet Nehemiah was able to mobilize the Jewish people.

Sober moral leadership in building an AI world can bring untold benefits to humanity, and the absence of such leadership can lead to disaster. Humanity, as the encyclical emphasizes, stands precisely at this fork in the road: if AI is subordinated to brutal profit-making, it will turn into “idolatry,” and the weak will be sacrificed to this idol.