PT II Reflecting on Magnifica Humanitas – A face, not a function

Weighed against the common good, Artificial Intelligence reveals both what it is and what it hides. Pope Leo XIV calls us to turn the digital world from a place of exploitation into one that protects human dignity.

Part two of three: This week, we reflect on Chapters Three and Four of Magnifica Humanitas.

Last week we considered the “two cities,” Babel and Jerusalem, that Pope Leo XIV, following St Augustine’s teaching, set before us. We asked: Which are we building?

This week, he hands us the measure for telling them apart: the common good. Does a technology serve the good of all, especially the least, or the advantage of a few? To weigh it, though, we must first understand what we are weighing—and what it can cost the person it exists to protect.

Understanding the machine

Leo is careful to say what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is—and is not. He writes in Magnifica Humanitas that, however dazzling their speed, these systems “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.” They do not “undergo experiences,” “possess a body,” “feel joy or pain”, or “mature through relationships.” They can simulate understanding, “but they do not understand what they produce” (99).

More unsettling still, today’s systems are “more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built’”—even those who design them grasp only in part how they work (98).

For this reason, he refuses to call a machine simply neutral. Every tool “embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimises.” Therefore, “we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral” (104).

The grandeur we must not lose

If the machine is only a tool, the person it serves is not. The technocratic mindset tempts us to treat the human being as “a project to be optimised rather than as persons called to relationship and communion” (112).

Leo warns where this leads: once a person can be “perfected or surpassed,” it becomes easier to accept “that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy” (117).

Against this, he defends what we are tempted to erase—our limits—for “humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them” (118).

Chapter Three is filled with witnesses: Viktor Frankl finding dignity in the death camps; the founding of the Red Cross and the abolition of slavery; Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela; and the “martyrs of everyday life”—parents, nurses, those who sit with the dying—showing that goodness is never automatic but must be chosen.

This is the grandeur no machine can replace. “The quality of a civilisation,” Leo writes, “is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer”—its readiness to see the other “as a face not merely as a function” (114).

Truth, work, and freedom

Chapter Four brings this reflection into daily life, into three arenas where the person is either honoured or diminished daily.

The first is truth, itself a common good. Disinformation is not new, Leo concedes, “yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI.” This threatens democracy, which rests on a shared grasp on the truth.

Leo quotes Hannah Arendt, who warned that tyranny’s ideal subjects are those “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … and the distinction between true and false … no longer exist” (134).

The second is work, long seen by the Church as more than a wage, for it “expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives.” Automation and AI can “de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks.”

Leo’s rule is firm: “the human person is an end, not a means” (152). A society—however advanced—that gives work to only a few risks “a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression” (154).

The third is freedom. Much of the digital world runs on an “attention economy” where platforms are “designed to capture users’ time and attention, exploiting their vulnerabilities and weakening their inner freedom.” When business models “thrive on human weakness,” Leo writes, the person is treated as a means, not an end (170).

Alongside this dependency runs the quiet harvesting of our data. When every movement, purchase and preference “leaves a trace,” a new power appears—”the power to profile, predict and influence behaviour”.

Used to decide who gets credit, work or essential services, it can entrench discrimination against the most vulnerable and, through what Leo calls “the architecture of visibility,” quietly shape what we see and think. Freedom in the digital age is no longer private but public (171).

The hidden chain

Here the encyclical turns to what our seamless screens conceal. “Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical,” Leo insists. “Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation”—vast networks of resources and energy, and above all people.

Millions do the “silent work” of labelling data and moderating disturbing content; children crush the ore from which our devices’ rare earths are drawn. Their bodies, the Pope says, are “scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly.” A technology that “promises emancipation yet produces new forms of global subordination” betrays the very dignity it claims to serve (173).

Naming this, Leo turns the examination of conscience upon the Church herself. She was slow, he acknowledges, to condemn slavery outright—for centuries it was tolerated, at times even legitimised, before its full incompatibility with the Gospel was recognised.

This “constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached.” And then, without evasion: “in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon” (176). That memory becomes a summons—to name today’s trafficking and exploitation clearly, lest we be made to ask pardon again.

Colonialism in a new form

The summons has a new frontier. “Even today,” Leo writes, “colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data.” Whole regions, often the most fragile, are mined for health records, genetic maps and demographic profiles—the “new ‘rare earths’ of power.”

Those who hold a people’s data can decide, before anyone else, “to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated.” Justice, Leo insists, means restoring to people their own data and the power to decide its use—otherwise the digital age will be “not post-colonial, but colonial in another form” (178).

Turning the tide toward dignity

Yet the encyclical does not end in lament. The same environment that has become a place of exploitation can be turned toward the good. Leo calls for transparent supply chains, so no advantage is built on hidden suffering; for companies to practise real “due diligence,” putting workers first; and for platforms to work with authorities and civil society against trafficking and abuse.

When these efforts converge, he writes, “the digital environment can be transformed from a space of exploitation into one of protection, prevention and the promotion of human dignity” (179). This is what the common good asks: not to abandon the machine, but to bend it, patiently, toward the good of all.

Key Message:

The measure of AI is the common good, the flourishing of every person, beginning with the least. By that light, AI is a powerful but never-neutral tool that can foster dependency, harvest our freedom and rest upon a hidden chain of exploited people. Leo’s charge is to turn the digital world into one that protects, prevents harm to, and promotes the dignity of all.

Action Step:

This week, look once behind the screen. Ask where the thing you use comes from—whose time, whose data, whose labour—and change one habit so it treats those people as ends, not means. Weigh one choice by the common good, and act.

Scripture for Reflection:

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” Matthew 25:40