Pope Leo XIV went viral on Monday with his warning about the threats AI poses to humanity and the steps he believes should be taken to ensure that “the idolatry of profit” does not “sacrifice the weak,” including helping workers made obsolete by the technology, creating rules about how AI can be used in war, and implementing regulations to ensure this stuff doesn’t destroy the planet. Pretty reasonable, and yet! It seems to have struck a nerve with a bunch of tech leaders and at least one Trump administration official, who suggested the American pope should zip it.
Commenting on Leo’s 42,300-word encyclical — titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence — Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of a company creating a supersonic airliner, wrote, “Bad take from the Pope. Tech revolutions tend to eliminate some jobs while creating others. If we cling onto jobs, we’d still be plowing fields by hand out of fear of disruption.”
While tech investor and former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks allowed that the pope “rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion,” he took issue with Leo’s call for regulation, claiming it would be a hop, skip, and a jump to some kind of 1984 nightmare in which the government uses AI to “censor, surveil, and control citizens.”
