When Pope Leo released his encyclical on AI some time back he offered the world a wide-ranging cultural assessment of the challenges that humanity faces with the far too rapid spread of these new technologies.
On his ongoing visit to France he spoke again about the dangers of AI and the “paradise of machines” that its promoters envision. The main problem with AI, as with most every other new technological innovation is that the people doing the innovating have so little of what the pope calls “ethical discernment”, that is, the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. And that is largely because, I would suggest, the engineers doing the development have been taught next to nothing about ethics or any other non-technical matters in their education. They seem to have derived their social “consciousness” from science fiction fantasies rather than from any real knowledge or understanding of how people and societies actually operate. And their calls for regulation seem more aimed at avoiding responsibility than taking any.
Here’s an article about the speech that appeared in the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/pope-leo-ai-threat-to-humanity-three-day-france-visit
