Pope Leo XIV speaks against the AI threat

[funkervogt]

His namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was pope from 1878 to 1903 and laid the foundation for modern Catholic social thought.

He did so most famously with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers’ rights and capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age.

The late pope criticized both laissez-faire capitalism and state-centric socialism, giving shape to a distinctly Catholic vein of economic teaching.

In his remarks Saturday, Leo said he identified with his predecessor, who addressed the great social question of the day posed by the industrial revolution in the encyclical.

He said: ‘In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.’

https://metro.co.uk/2025/05/10/pope-leo ... -23061635/

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^More on that:

Pope Leo Identifies AI as Main Challenge in First Meeting with Cardinals
May 10, 2025

Introduction:

(AL Jazeera) Pope Leo XIV has held his first meeting with the world’s cardinals since his election as the head of the Catholic Church, identifying artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the most crucial issues facing humanity.

Leo, the first American pope, laid out a vision of his papacy at the Vatican on Saturday, telling the cardinals who elected him that AI poses challenges to defending “human dignity, justice and labour” – a view shared with his predecessor, the late Pope Francis.

Explaining his choice of name, the pontiff said he identified with the late Leo XIII, who had defended workers’ rights during his 1878-1903 papacy at the dawn of the industrial age, adding that “social teaching” was now needed in response to the modern-day revolution brought by AI.

The late Pope Francis, who died last month, warned that AI risked turning human relations into mere algorithms and called for an international treaty to regulate it.

Francis warned the Group of Seven industrialised nations last year that AI must remain human-centric, so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools would not fall to machines.

Read more here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/ ... ardinals