A Pope for the AI Era

In choosing the name Leo XIV, our new Holy Father has set himself an urgent task: to diagnose the ills of our age and offer wisdom, as Pope Leo XIII did for his own time and beyond. 

As Russell Hittinger, the foremost contemporary scholar of Leo XIII, argues, Leo’s social teaching is in the service of “three necessary societies”: marriage and the family, polity, and the Church. They have necessary and enduring ends, and belonging to them is a key part of being human. While we can fill in Leo’s framework with civil society groups and the market, we cannot escape these three societies. They satisfy fundamental human ends in ways that no other orders can. 

What is the value of such Leonine wisdom in the age of artificial intelligence? In many ways, the challenge of AI is an intensification of the great question of our time: What does it mean to be human? 

AI, among other things, risks replacing human workers in many tasks. More fundamentally, it threatens to reorganize the economy and society in ways that benefit the few rather than the common good, ultimately leading man to serve the market, rather than the market to serve man. But still worse is the fear that humans will acquiesce willingly to these dynamics, happy to cede one of the fundamental marks of being human: their social nature.

Without accepting the gloomiest predictions for such technologies, we can nevertheless agree with Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about a disturbing pattern: Humans, at least in the post-industrial West, increasingly seem to prefer the virtual to the real, the mediated to the unmediated. Above all, as she documents in her book The Extinction of Experience, one of the greatest costs of such a preference is the loss of opportunities to interact with other people. We manage who we meet with, how, when, and why, if at all. We are losing valuable skills in interacting with strangers and reading the emotions of others, preferring virtual experiences that we curate ourselves—or at least that we tell ourselves we curate. In outsourcing so much of our cognitive and emotional lives to social media and AI technology, we increasingly seek to limit the uncertainty that other people can bring into our solipsistic existence. We thus miss that happiness really is other people. To paraphrase Yuval Levin, we seem content with communication over communion. 

Rosen’s thesis can be backed up by any number of studies showing that Americans particularly are lonely, isolated, and unhappy, but also increasingly incapable of doing anything about it. The solution to the isolation encouraged by technology seems to be more of that same isolating technology, which only risks exacerbating underlying inequalities and further dehumanizing the lowest of the low. 

This anti-social tendency is disturbing because it strikes at the very motor of the three necessary societies: human sociality. If we do not want to be together, how can we live together and flourish through family, political life, and the Church?

When Leo was drafting Arcanum, Rerum Novarum, and Diuturnum, Hittinger argued, the necessity of these three societies was not in doubt. What was at issue, rather, was their precedence. Political regimes of all stripes were claiming superiority to the Church, and particularly the right to control areas of life, including marriage and education, in which the Church had long claimed a stake.

Today, however, the challenge has been further refined: As technological and economic forces vitiate human sociality, so do they threaten the very basis of the three necessary societies. AI will bring great benefits, but many of its costs will be hidden—or rather we will choose not to see them. That applies especially to the costs borne by other humans. Humans won’t just be bowling alone, but increasingly seeking virtual substitutes for the fundamentally social activities intrinsic to family, political, and ecclesial life.

None of this is inevitable, however. Leo reminds us that social bodies like the family are not simply passive recipients of the challenges of our time. They are better seen as solutions to those struggles: as schools of humanity, places where we can embrace our vocation as political, rational, and liturgical animals.

In this task of human formation the Church has much to offer, for it embodies a communion of persons in which we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, but all one in Christ, made in the image of God. Even if we do not always live out that vocation adequately, we stand as a witness to the unity possible only through Christ. We are, and must be, a sign of contradiction. 

We indeed never offer better formation in the human than when we celebrate the Mass, where heaven meets earth and believers are united across all lands and all ages. In adopting an attitude of worship and reverence, we offer the world a lesson in humility and receptivity, to accept as a gift the most precious things about us, because they are from God.

None of this is an instant recipe for how our new Holy Father should undertake his new mission, of course, but rather an earnest prayer that he may be successful in it. May all Christians pray for and labor alongside him, nourished by the gratitude that God has given us another, doubtless very different, Leo.