This past week, Pope Leo the 14th issued what may be the most significant papal encyclical

in over a century, and its subject was artificial intelligence. Now, popes don't issue encyclicals casually.

These are rare formal letters addressed not just to Catholics,

but to all men and women of goodwill.

They are reserved for moments when the church believes something fundamental

about human dignity is at stake.

The last encyclical of comparable historical weight was issued in

1891 by Pope Leo the 13th, who wrote in direct response to the suffering that was brought on

by the Industrial Revolution. As the New Yorkers Jill Lepore put it, Leo the 13th indicted robber barons.

Leo the 14th indicts tech moguls. But there's also

something much more fundamental at stake in this moment. What makes AI different from every prior

transformational technology in human history is not just its scale or its speed, it's what it

threatens to replace. The printing press democratized knowledge, the steam

engine replaced human muscle, the internet connected the world. All of that was revolutionary,

but none of those technologies threatened to replace human thought itself. None of them could

learn or adapt or reason or create.

And while AI, like the mechanical loom and electricity and the combustion engine and the internet,

will do groundbreaking things for us.

In fact, just this last week, a mathematical problem that couldn't be solved for 80 years was in fact solved by AI.

This feeling that at least for now, AI will cost us more than it gets us

is becoming pervasive. And that feeling is surfacing everywhere, in town halls, in zoning meetings,

in protests and college commencement ceremonies, in big towns and small ones across the country.

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