Holy Smoke: Michael Gove on why the Pope's AI intervention shames our politicians
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The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
The Spectator's editor Michael Gove ‘was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture’, but – in this week's magazine – is ‘giving thanks to the Pope’ for producing Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical about artificial intelligence (AI). AI will be ‘as transformative as the Industrial Revolution’ but decisions ‘about where this technology is going and how it might be deployed are concentrated... in perilously few hands’.
Michael joins Damian Thompson on Holy Smoke to explain why the document reveals Pope Leo to be 'intellectually confident and coherent', what the Christian response to AI should be and why he believes Catholic social teaching is 'absolutely essential' in instructing us for how to deal with this next technological revolution.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, unrivaled books and arts reviews, and so much more, all for just £12. |
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| 0:28.1 | Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson. |
| 0:45.9 | Pope Leo the 14th this week published the first major teaching document of his pontificate, a 42,000 word encyclical on the challenge of artificial intelligence entitled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity. |
| 0:58.5 | This document has sparked an extremely lively debate around the world, I think perhaps more than |
| 1:04.4 | any other encyclical I can remember. And the spectator's editor, Michael Gove, was very quick |
| 1:09.9 | off the mark to read it, and in this week's magazine he gives us his verdict. |
| 1:15.9 | And he joins us today. |
| 1:17.6 | Michael, welcome to Holy Smoke. |
| 1:20.6 | And may I just begin by asking, this is a hugely ambitious, even intimidating subject for the Pope to have tackled in his first |
| 1:28.9 | encyclical. You've read the whole thing. How do you think he did? Well, I would give him, |
| 1:34.3 | if I were an examiner, and I would hesitate to pass judgment on his holiness, but I would give him |
| 1:39.2 | straight alphas or even alpha plus. I think like many people, obviously I'm not a Roman Catholic. |
| 1:44.1 | Like many people, I was uncertain when a Roman Catholic, like many people, |
| 1:45.1 | I was uncertain when the new pope was appointed quite what we were in for. I think that there |
| 1:50.0 | were different signals about the type of pope that he might be following on from Francis. |
| 1:56.3 | One thing that we can emphatically say is that he is an intellectually confident and coherent Pope. |
| 2:05.1 | And we can also now, I think, better understand why he chose Leo as a name. |
| 2:10.2 | Because this encyclical is a deliberate nod towards and carrying forward of the spirit of Reram Navarum, Leo the 13th |
| 2:22.2 | encyclical 135 years ago, which essentially set out what we now think of as Catholic social |
| 2:29.2 | thought for the 20th century. And what Leo the 14th has done in this encyclical is look at the changes |
... |
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