Introductory Remarks
I have been writing about artificial intelligence for a long time its promises, its pitfalls, and what it does to our ways of thinking and working. This is not a subject I observe from afar: it is the terrain on which I move every day, with the conviction that technology only makes sense if it remains at the service of human freedom, rather than its substitution.
On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, dedicated to the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. I am not a theologian, and it is not through a religious lens that I read it. I read it as a foundational text, rare in its lucidity, which directly confronts questions that the technological world often evades: that of the dignity of the person in the face of algorithms, the silent dispossession of thought, the biases that our automated systems crystallize and amplify, and the growing divide between those who master these tools and those who are governed by them without being told.
Certain passages resonate directly with what I have been writing for months on my blog about “vibe thinking,” the proletarianization of intelligence, and the confusion between producing and creating. When a text coming from an horizon so different from mine touches upon the very same points of concern and poses the exact same questions, it seems important to note it. Not to give it a validation it does not seek, but because the convergence of different perspectives on the same problem is rarely a coincidence.
What follows is my reading of this encyclical, informed by my own reflections. It does not claim to exhaust its richness, nor to adopt all of its perspectives. It simply seeks to bridge the gap between an institutional thought that deserves to be heard beyond its usual circles, and the very concrete questions that each of us should be asking about what we are currently building, or allowing to be built in our place.
From the weaver’s shuttle to artificial intelligence: for an ethics of construction
In 1733, an English weaver named John Kay developed what would come to be known as the flying shuttle. The invention may seem modest: a simple mechanism allowing a single worker to pass the shuttle from one end of the loom to the other, where two were previously required. But its effects were immediate and spectacular. Productivity soared, pieces of fabric could be made wider, and the workshops that adopted the innovation saw their profitability transformed.
Very quickly, however, a quiet question began to circulate through weaving communities: if one man now does the work of two, what becomes of the others? Anxiety turned to anger. The weavers of Colchester addressed a petition to the King to ban the invention, accusing Kay of wanting to “take away their bread.” The hostility eventually boiled over: in 1753, a riot broke out, and the inventor’s house was ransacked. Kay had to flee, hidden in a wool sack according to legend, to escape the vengeance of those whose work he had sought to accelerate.
When a lawyer discovers today that an artificial intelligence can analyze hundreds of pages of contracts in a few seconds; when a doctor sees an algorithm deliver a rare diagnosis with unsettling precision; when a teacher realizes that a program can draft an undetectable essay, do they not feel the same shiver as the weavers of Colchester? That sensation that their expertise, patiently built over years, could become obsolete overnight.
There is, however, a major difference between their era and ours. Eighteenth-century weavers saw the danger coming, identified it in its physical form of wood and metal, and opposed it. We, on the contrary, eagerly embrace artificial intelligence. We invite it into our pockets, into our living rooms; we entrust it with our thoughts, our research, our creations. The submission is consensual, seductive, comfortable. The tool does not impose itself by force; it offers itself through convenience. It does not suffocate violently: it envelops gently, under the guise of a service rendered.
It is precisely in the face of this vertigo that Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, signed on May 15, 2026, takes on its full strength. The date is not accidental: one hundred and thirty-five years after Rerum Novarum, in which Leo XIII confronted the upheavals of the first Industrial Revolution, his successor takes up the pen to respond to the challenges of the digital revolution. The context has changed (smokestack factories have given way to data centers) but the need to find a just path remains intact. And from its very first pages, the text poses a question of disarming simplicity: what are we building?
Babel or Jerusalem: two ways of inhabiting the world
To shed light on this choice, the encyclical is structured around two biblical images that are by no means pious, superficial metaphors. They are two archetypes of human action in history, two postures toward technology and toward the other.
On one side, the Tower of Babel. Not as a symbol of unholy progress, but as a portrait of a very specific temptation: that of hubris, the excess that drives man to believe that technical power is self-sufficient, that it can dispense with wisdom, humility, and even with the other. For Babel is not the failure of a construction: it is the failure of speech. Before the dispersion, men understood each other. They shared a common language, an ability to deliberate together, to construct a collective meaning. What the confusion destroyed was not the tower, but this shared intelligence, replaced by babblings that each person believes to be the truth.
One recognizes in this image something unsettling about our own era. Engagement-optimization algorithms do not construct a unified world: they manufacture thousands of parallel languages, each perfectly tailored to a profile, each impervious to the others. Artificial intelligence ultra-personalizes every digital experience, and in this gesture of apparent benevolence, it slowly destroys the shared space without which no deliberation is possible, no city, no common good. Here we are, scattered, no longer on the plain of Shinar, but across data streams that never cross paths.
On the other side, Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. But here the symbol must be read carefully, for the walls are not an end in themselves. They only have value if they protect without enclosing, if they demarcate a sacred space without cutting off the person living there from the rest of the world. A Jerusalem in ruins does not rise again by decree or by magical technology. It is reborn first through inner work: Nehemiah inspects the debris alone before summoning the people; he orders his vision before calling for action. It is from this inner order that a collective order can be born. Each family then takes charge of a section of the wall, each craftsman assumes his part of the common work, without anyone being in a position to claim the entire creation. This is lived subsidiarity, trust placed in every living stone.
The encyclical rejects the false dilemma. It is not technology that must be judged, but the use we make of it, and above all the state of mind in which we deploy it. Technology is neither absolute evil nor the salvation of humanity. It is what we make of it. And that is precisely where everything is decided.
For we are already building. Every algorithm deployed without safeguards is a stone laid somewhere. Every decision entrusted to a machine without anyone assuming responsibility for it is a stone laid somewhere. Every child whose attention is captured six hours a day by systems designed to maximize engagement is a stone laid somewhere. The question is not whether we are building. We are building. The question is what.
Are we erecting a new Babel, impressive in power, dizzying in efficiency, and deaf to the humans it disperses? Or are we seeking to rebuild a common city, stone by stone, beginning with that more thankless and necessary task: putting order into our own relationship with the tools we have created, before pretending to let the world benefit from them?
This choice will not be made in grand conference halls or at symposia on responsible AI. It is being made now, in the ordinary decisions of every day. Which construction site are we participating in? And do we really know?
Dignity as the cornerstone
Every solid construction requires a foundation. In the edifice of technological ethics proposed by Magnifica Humanitas, this cornerstone is the ontological dignity of the human person.
A distinction must be made here between this fundamental dignity and other forms of dignity (moral, social, existential) which can fluctuate depending on circumstances. Ontological dignity is a gift, not a merit. It is not earned through virtuous actions, it is not measured by the yardstick of success, and above all, it is not evaluated in terms of performance or cognitive abilities. It precedes all judgment, all calculation, all classification.
The practical consequence of this principle is radical in the all-digital age: no algorithm can grant or strip away this dignity. To entrust an automated system with the power to select who deserves a loan, a job, or healthcare, without a human conscience bearing the weight of that decision, amounts to denying this dignity. When the machine decides alone, injustice becomes silent and structural, because it cloaks itself in the attire of mathematical neutrality.
Yet this neutrality is an illusion. An algorithm is not a truth dropped from heaven: it is a mirror held up to the data on which it was trained. Now, this data is human, and therefore historically marked by centuries of discrimination, unequal access, and sedimented prejudices. A model trained on past hiring decisions will mechanically reproduce the biases of past recruiters. A risk-assessment tool for criminal sentencing will learn the patterns of a justice system that has not always treated everyone equally. The machine does not invent injustice; it crystallizes and accelerates it, giving it, to boot, the impassive face of objectivity. It is precisely this appearance of impartiality that makes it harder to challenge than the decision of a human being.
The encyclical is cutting on this point: the person cannot be reduced to a data profile. Decisions that affect their life must remain understandable, contestable, and subject, in the final instance, to human judgment.
This assertion leads us to rethink our relationship with limits. Transhumanist currents, influential in Silicon Valley circles, promise us a future where technology will liberate us from our frailties, from sickness, and even from death. In this vision, a limit is a manufacturing defect to be corrected through engineering. Yet, vulnerability is not a coding error. It is the very threshold of our humanity. It is in the experience of finitude, of failure, of lack, that compassion, loyalty, and unconditional giving are born.
Viktor Frankl formulated this with a lucidity that the most extreme circumstances only sharpened. Amid the horror of the camps, he saw that man is the being who invented the gas chambers, but also the being who entered them with his head held high, the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. This irreducible tension between the worst and the best of humanity is something technology can neither resolve nor erase. On the contrary, it is its beating heart.
The encyclical states it unambiguously: to renounce this human adventure, at once dramatic and splendid, in the name of a supposed transcending of all limits, could mean many things, but certainly not being human. Relieving suffering is a duty. Dreaming of an artificial invulnerability is quite another. To eliminate pain entirely would, at its core, require turning off love as well.
When thinking becomes a rare act
There is another dimension to this dispossession, more insidious because it is more mundane. It touches not our bodies, but our thoughts.
There was a time, not so long ago, when understanding was not limited to obtaining an answer. Searching was already an act. A way of inhabiting a question, of letting it mature. It was not always comfortable, but it was intellectually alive. One would wander off the path, return, and sometimes get lost. It was within this gap, within this slowness, that thought took shape.
Today, answers arrive before the question has even had time to form. They come ready-to-use, statistically plausible, beautifully formatted. We consult, we validate with a click, and we believe we have searched. But something has broken. It is not just that everything goes faster: it is that this speed prevents certain movements of thought from existing. Inhabiting a paradoxical idea, taming a persistent doubt, letting an intuition mature, all of this requires a rhythm that we have ceased to live by.
The machine does not doubt. It calculates probabilities, it suggests, it anticipates. It relieves us of the effort of choosing. We thus slide into a form of prolonged childhood, devoid of trials or silence, where every choice is pre-chewed so it can be validated without question. This world wishes us no harm. It wants our own good, but in our place. It keeps us in a softness devoid of growth.
This displacement of thought is something the encyclical takes seriously. It sees in it a form of proletarianization of the mind. The modern proletarian is not just someone who lacks means; it is someone from whom the understanding of what they do has been removed. We act without always understanding the drivers of our actions, we choose from options we did not define, we speak using words suggested to us. We were builders; we have become tenants of intelligence.
What do we lose when we eliminate effort? We lose the thickness of time. Reflection time is not dead time; it is the incompressible time of gestation. By delegating to the machine the task of summarizing, synthesizing, and producing, we deprive ourselves of the inner journey which alone allows for the true appropriation of knowledge. We become consumers of ideas rather than producers of meaning.
Thinking for oneself has become almost suspect, perceived as too slow, too demanding for an era hungry for reactivity. Yet, active withdrawal, the step aside, is more necessary than ever. Free will does not assert itself through grand declarations: it is experienced in the refusal of an automatism, in the slowness of an assumed choice. One must know how to quiet things down to hear what, inside us, resists algorithmic evidence.
The foundations of an AI ethics
Every building that lasts rests on foundations that cannot be seen. It is they that determine what the construction can carry, what it can weather, and what it will leave standing after the storms. Magnifica Humanitas lays down three of these foundations for an ethics of artificial intelligence. They have nothing revolutionary about them in themselves; they belong to a long tradition of social thought. But applied to our era, they take on a new, almost urgent sharpness.
The first is the universal destination of goods. Traditionally applied to natural resources, this concept must today be extended to algorithms, digital platforms, and above all, data. Data, the fruit of our collective interactions, cannot be the exclusive property of a few tech monopolies. This concentration creates a new kind of inequality. The encyclical calls for shared governance models guaranteeing transparency and equitable access to these resources which constitute, in fact, the common heritage of digital humanity. To believe that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore an obvious truth: without a deliberate policy to prevent disparities, technological progress mechanically breeds structural inequalities.
The second principle is that of digital subsidiarity. What can be accomplished at a local level must not be absorbed by a distant, higher authority. Applied to the digital world, this means that major transnational platforms cannot dictate the rules of our online coexistence by themselves. Control must be given back to communities, recreating intermediate bodies capable of exercising real democratic oversight over the tools we use. The algorithms that structure our public square must be contestable, auditable, and adapted to local realities rather than imposed as a single, globalized norm.
The third principle, perhaps the most audacious, is the call to “disarm” artificial intelligence. This is no primitive Luddism. Disarming AI means breaking the deceptive equivalence between technical power and the right to govern. It means making models habitable, restoring them to the plurality of human cultures. This demands from designers and developers a responsibility of a different order: they are not merely coders solving technical problems. They are the architects of our shared mental space. Limiting oneself to one’s own field of expertise means risking involuntary cooperation in projects that feed new forms of domination.
These three principles are not rules imposed from the outside. They outline an inner requirement, that of a builder who knows that the quality of their work depends first on the quality of their intention. Sharing what belongs to all, respecting the human scale, refusing to let power become an end in itself, this is the design brief for a construction that deserves to last. And it is from there, and only there, that concrete undertakings can begin.
Three undertakings for tomorrow
These principles call for concrete applications. The encyclical identifies three, which are also three urgent priorities.
The first is that of the school. In the face of hyperstimulation and digital immediacy, education cannot be reduced to teaching code or software usage. Educating for artificial intelligence also means learning to distance oneself from it, to cultivate a critical mind toward its productions. The school must offer what the network cannot give: extended time shared in the physical world, embodied relationships of trust, the learning of silence, and deep reading. This is an educational alliance that must be forged between families, institutions, and communities to preserve the inner space of younger generations. The encyclical is explicit: educating new generations to understand that technological evolution is not an inevitable destiny but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility is one of the most precious services to the common good.
The second undertaking is that of work. The anxiety of the Colchester weavers has not disappeared; it has shifted. Automation threatens not only incomes, but the professional identity and dignity of millions of people. The encyclical recalls a simple anthropological truth: we do not just do a job to earn a living; we are, in large part, defined by our work. It is urgent to impose social criteria on innovation: all automation should be accompanied by verifiable measures for job protection, professional retraining, and worker participation in decisions. Global wealth has increased, but its concentration has intensified. Access to the benefits of technology (healthcare, training, tools) is itself a question of justice.
The third undertaking is that of peace, and it is perhaps the most dizzying. The classical theory of just war, developed over centuries by theologians and philosophers, rested on a premise that was taken for granted: behind every decision to kill, there is a human who chooses, who assumes responsibility, who can be held accountable. This chain of moral responsibility was the last rampart against barbarism. It presupposed that someone, somewhere, looks the decision they are making in the eye, bears its weight, and answers for it before their peers and before history. Military artificial intelligence breaks precisely this chain. Not brutally, but in stages, through successive delegations, until the moment when nobody truly decides anymore, and everyone can declare themselves innocent.
An autonomous drone that identifies and neutralizes a target in a few milliseconds leaves no room for doubt, for pity, or for the fact that the enemy is perhaps a father who has laid down his weapon. It optimizes. It executes. Just war presupposed the possibility of clemency: yet the machine knows no clemency, because it has not been trained to feel the need for it. It does not recognize the face of the other. It recognizes a thermal signature, a movement pattern, a probability of threat. This is a difference that is not technical. It is moral, and it is abyssal.
The encyclical rejects this abdication with a clarity that leaves no room for ambiguity: no lethal decision can be delegated to an algorithm. Ever. Regardless of the tactical gain, regardless of the claimed precision, regardless of the pressure of real-time operations. And to make this prohibition operational, it lays down three criteria that must strictly govern any use of AI in armed conflicts.
The first is identifiable responsibility. To every lethal action must correspond a named human being who made the decision or authorized it, and who can answer for it. Not an algorithm. Not a system. A person, with a name, a rank, a conscience. This criterion seems obvious until one realizes that current military architectures are precisely designed to dilute it, distributing decisions across layers of automated systems so that responsibility becomes untraceable.
The second is the respect for the time necessary for human judgment. Speed is the ultimate argument of proponents of autonomous systems: the adversary decides in milliseconds, we cannot afford the luxury of deliberation. The encyclical turns this argument around: if a situation demands a decision so rapid that no human can assume it, then perhaps that situation should not exist, or the rules of engagement must be rethought upstream. Speed is not a moral value. It absolves no one.
The third is the unconditional protection of civilians, not as a constraint of acceptable collateral damage to be minimized, but as an absolute line that is non-negotiable based on operational calculation. An algorithm can be programmed to “minimize” civilian casualties. It cannot understand what it means to kill a child. This difference between minimizing and understanding is exactly the difference between optimization and moral conscience.
This undertaking joins the other two in the same core requirement: refusing to let technical power become a sufficient reason to act. At school, in the factory, on the battlefield, the question remains the same. Who decides? Who takes responsibility? Who looks square in the face what is being done in our name?
The beauty of the unfinished
There is a final dimension that the encyclical does not state explicitly but which one feels running beneath every page: that of imperfection as a sign of life.
In our quest for optimization, we have forgotten that beauty often resides in the flaw. A work generated by an artificial intelligence may be technically flawless. It will never have that extra soul, the palpable emotion, the trace of the hesitant hand that make up the value of a human creation. Error and fragility are not bugs to be corrected: they are the marks of our humanity. It is because we are fallible that we are capable of forgiveness, compassion, and love.
The machine aims for the closure of the system, absolute completion. Man, on the other hand, is fundamentally an unfinished being, in perpetual becoming. It is this incompleteness that makes his greatness, for it is the engine of his desire, of his quest for meaning, of his openness to that which surpasses him. Human work (artistic, intellectual, social) always bears the mark of this incompleteness. It leaves room for mystery, for the unexpected. It is into this breach that the poetry of the world can rush.
But here is the paradox that the encyclical, between the lines, invites us to look square in the face: if incompleteness is our greatness, why do we flee it so ardently? Why this so powerful seduction by tools that promise us, at last, flawless work, texts without hesitation, decisions without the weight of doubt? The machine was not imposed on us. We welcomed it with relief, as one welcomes the end of a tension held too long. What we are fleeing in it is perhaps the discomfort of being human: the slowness, the error, the blank page, the silence before the answer.
And what if that was precisely what we cannot afford to lose?
Magnifica Humanitas does not condemn this temptation. It understands it. But it reminds us that relieving the suffering of effort is not the same as removing its meaning. That the creative intelligence of the human being is a gift that can relieve real suffering and open new possibilities, provided it remains guided by something the machine cannot simulate: concern for the other, awareness of one’s own limits, and the will to build not for oneself, but for those who will come after.
Light comes from the construction site
Let us return one last time to Nehemiah. He inspects the ruins of Jerusalem in the silence of the night, alone, before anyone knows what he has seen. He makes no speeches. He publishes no manifestos. He walks around the collapsed walls, he places his hand on the blackened stones, he measures what will be required. Then, in the morning, he summons the people and distributes the task. Each family takes a section of the wall. The work begins again, stone after stone, without waiting for a miracle.
This is the image the encyclical holds out to us. Not as a consolation. As an examination of conscience.
For the question is not whether technology threatens us. It transforms us, certainly, and nothing will stop it. The question is what we do with this transformation. What we do with it, ourselves, now, in the choices we make every day without realizing it.
When you entrust an algorithm with the drafting of a message that you could have written yourself, what exactly are you giving up? An hour of your time, or something harder to name? When a platform hands you its selection of news before you have even formulated a question, are you accepting help or integrating a guardianship? When a tool predicts your preferences with a precision that surprises even you, does it know you better than you know yourself, or is it simply finishing shaping you in its image?
These questions are not rhetorical. They have no obvious answers, and that is precisely why they deserve to be asked aloud, in families, companies, schools, parliaments, and churches. Building the human in the age of machines means, first and foremost, refusing to let these questions dissolve into the comfort of habit.
John Kay fled in a wool sack. Nehemiah rebuilt walls. Neither had any certainty about the outcome. They had only decided that giving up cost more than acting.
We are their heirs, whether we like it or not. The construction site is open. The stones are there, at our feet. The only question that matters, the one the encyclical has been asking implicitly since its first page, is simple and dizzying: what are we building? And for whom?
References
For meticulous minds, lovers of numbers and sleepless nights verifying sources, here are the links that nourished this article. They remind us of one simple thing: information still exists, as long as we take the time to read it, compare it, and understand it. But in the near future, this simple gesture may become a luxury, because as texts generated entirely by AIs multiply, the real risk is no longer disinformation, but the dilution of reality in an ocean of merely plausible content.
[1] The invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 and the 1753 riot: Simkin, J. (1997, updated 2022). John Kay. Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/SCkay.htm
[2] Biographical details and the hostility of the Colchester weavers: Wikipedia. John Kay (flying shuttle). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kay_(flying_shuttle
[3] The date of Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891) by Leo XIII, foundational text of the social doctrine of the Church: Vatican. Rerum Novarum. Retrieved from https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
[4] The “technocratic paradigm,” a key concept introduced by Pope Francis in Laudato si’ (2015) and reiterated in Laudate Deum (2023): Vatican. Laudato si’. Retrieved from https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
[5] Algorithmic reproduction biases, notably the investigation into COMPAS (criminal risk assessment): Angwin, J., Larson, J., Mattu, S., & Kirchner, L. (2016). Machine Bias. ProPublica. Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing
[6] Biases in recruitment algorithms, with the case of Amazon: Dastin, J. (2018). Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/
[7] Quotation on the man who invented the gas chambers and the one who enters them head high with a prayer: Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Revised edition, Beacon Press. The exact quote is: “After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.“
[8] The proletarianization of intelligence and the loss of know-how: Stiegler, B. (2015). La société automatique : 1. L’avenir du travail. Fayard.
[9] The impact of the Internet on cognition and attention: Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company.
[10] The attention economy and surveillance capitalism: Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
[11] The concentration of global and technological wealth: Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. (2022). World Inequality Report 2022. World Inequality Lab. Retrieved from https://wir2022.wid.world/
[12] The increase in the wealth of tech billionaires: Oxfam (2024). Multinationales et inégalités multiples. Oxfam Report 2024. Retrieved from https://www.oxfamfrance.org/inegalites-et-justice-fiscale/multinationales-et-inegalites-multiples/
[13] Transhumanism and the ambition to defeat death in Silicon Valley: Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking. And recent initiatives like Bryan Johnson’s “Project Blueprint.”
[14] The ethical and legal debate on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and the absence of human control: Stop Killer Robots Campaign. Retrieved from https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/