Pope Leo is right on ontology: human beings are distinct from the machines we build, bearers of a dignity no stochastic parrot can replicate or replace.
But the rest of his arguments are weak and don't follow from this key premise. The vibe shouldn't be one of boomer caution, but one of young love and hope. We're living in a golden age.
If the West decelerates, China wins. Prudence requires acceleration, not "disarmament," a sensationalist metaphor that begs the question and implicitly emboldens the kind of terorrists that want to bomb data centers.
The pope is right that work is a source of dignity, but wrong that AI is going to be the death of work: lamplighters, knocker-uppers, ice cutters, switchboard operators, matchstick dippers whose jawbones rotted from phosphorus, human "computers" doing arithmetic by hand ten hours a day — every one of those jobs slid into obsolescence and every obsolescence was net good. Work has dignity but specific jobs don't, and confusing the two is how you end up defending phosphorus poisoning as vocation.
The pope is also wrong in ascribing monopolistic power to Big Tech. That's an empirical judgment, not one we should outsource to clerics. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, plus open weights are collapsing the cost of intelligence toward zero, proof of competition. None is a monopoly. They're driving consumer surplus and the right response is gratitude.
It's possible to be accelerationist on AI and remain a humanist. Ironically, the Pope's cautious, protectionist stance which worries about AI replacing us, demonstrates a lack of trust in human intelligence's ability to win on its own merits.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html