Leo Contra Machina?
The new pope wants us all to stop and think about our use of technology
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the machine!
— Definitely not Dylan Thomas
What a few weeks it has been for observers of the Roman Catholic Church! First there was the ongoing illness of Pope Francis and his efforts to meet with the faithful for Holy Week festivities. Then there was the “will he, won’t he” of his audience with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. It seemed at first that Francis would shun the politician who seemed so ideologically opposed, but in the end, he did meet with Vance on Easter Sunday. When the Holy Father passed away the following day, there was a frenzy of (joking?) speculation that Vance was responsible for his death.
It was then the turn of all world leaders to descend on Rome for the papal funeral. These were the days of sede vacante, filled with furious speculation. Would the cardinals elect a successor just like Francis who would push the Church in a progressive direction? Or would there be an equal and opposite reaction, with a staunch conservative as pontifex maximus?
Given the legendary secrecy of the conclave proceedings, the media had little solid information to guide them as they attempted to read the papal tea leaves. However, that did not stop them from filling hour after hour with analysis. Might Cardinal Tagle’s charisma place him ahead? Was it time for a pope from Sub-Saharan Africa? Might they choose someone from the United States of America? (“Surely not!” most concluded.) The one thing we could all agree on was that Pizzaballa was a cool name.
Even NBC’s polling nerd, Steve Kornacki, more accustomed to dealing with the electoral college, was summoned to break down the conclave’s voting process. As the cardinals processed into the Sistine Chapel and took their solemn oaths (which some of them have possibly broken in the days since, granting all sorts of insights to the media), the world cast its eyes to the building’s ceiling for signs of white smoke. What we got instead was an ongoing drama involving some seagulls who were evidently so filled with the Spirit which had descended on that place, they gave birth to a new member of their species.
I am not a Roman Catholic, but I was as excited as anyone. After all, I am still a Christian, and I love Church history. Here was Church history happening in real time! When white smoke appeared on just the second day, I reasoned, “They must have picked someone who was well-known to begin with, and who is somewhat middle-of-the-road.” There could not have been time for a complete unknown to emerge, or for a desperate consensus to form around the lesser of two evils. Whoever had been elected must have enjoyed strong support from the beginning. This much seemed obvious.
I admit I hoped for a pope neither strongly liberal nor strongly conservative: a humble man skilled at bringing people together, and preferably one a bit younger than his immediate predecessors, as I had no memory of a pope who was not an octogenarian or something close to it. Not that I hate those advanced in age, but it seemed like popes were always getting sick, struggling to fulfill the demands of their office. At a time when my own country has been ruled by two very old presidents in turn, and the king of England was over 70 at his coronation, I longed for someone with a bit of energy left to give.
When they announced the name Robert Prevost and I realized they had indeed gone with an American, the exact words that escaped my mouth were, “Holy crap! Holy crap! Holy crap!” It is a Midwestern American sort of response, and most appropriate, for as it turns out, this is a Midwestern pope.
Certainly, his life experiences have connected him with the people of Peru and Latin America as a whole. He is in some sense a citizen of the world. Yet, I felt a sense of pride that my home area, which is often maligned by those in the coastal regions of the United States (“flyover territory”), was able to provide the world with a pope. I have spent my adult life having people comment on my accent and feeling almost apologetic about it, as if I must try doubly hard to prove my intelligence. (Those from the southeastern United States are even more burdened in this regard.) Suddenly, Chicago was the center of the country. The Midwest seemed to have value after all.
But once the initial days of funny stories passed—the Wordle games with his brother, the debate over his MLB allegiance, the attempts by the Chicago-based restaurant chain Portillo’s to market a papal sandwich called “The Leo”—I began to pay more attention to what Pope Leo XIV was saying. While he might be middle-of-the-road ideologically and have a less fiery personality than Pope Francis, he is clearly a man with something to say, and his stated intent is to lead the Roman Catholic Church and all people of goodwill to meet the challenges posed by rapid technological change.
I have lived long enough to hear multiple things lamented as the inevitable source of humanity’s demise—nuclear weapons, climate change, Islamist terrorism, critical race theory, the sheer weight of outrage over Katy Perry’s visit to space—but the past few years have pushed another competitor to the front of the pack in this race for ultimate destruction.
Artificial intelligence stands at the center of our cultural debates today. Did Charles Babbage know what he was unleashing on humanity when he created his computing machine? Likely not, for as the intrepid reporter Philomena Cunk has noted, he could not even foresee that his machine would forever autocorrect his surname to “cabbage.” However, for some time now, it has been clear that computers would one day be able to achieve something close to human thinking, if not surpass it. Having been properly trained, they would be able to essentially think for themselves.
Isaac Asimov, likely the greatest science fiction author of the 20th century, drafted the laws robots would have to follow if they wanted to live among humans as equals. It remains to be seen whether our thinking machines have any interest in subjecting themselves to Mr. Asimov’s whims. However, the chief worry at present is not that artificially intelligent robots will conquer the globe, but that they will put us all out of a job.
I used to rejoice that my discipline of writing was one of the few things that could not be outsourced to machines—a gloriously human endeavor, proof of the image of God. Then back in 2018 or so, my husband showed me a website where I could enter the first line or two of a story and it would proceed to write the next paragraph. It was only an experimental tool, and the prose it produced was certainly not Pulitzer worthy, but I knew then and there that my profession was no longer safe. A few years later, the entire world was introduced to a far more powerful tool: ChatGPT.
When future historians write the history of the 2020s, I am sure they will devote some time to the Covid pandemic, the war between Russia and Ukraine, Hamas’ attack on Israel and the subsequent torrent of violence in the Middle East, and the rise of populist leaders like Donald Trump. But I strongly suspect they will conclude the most consequential moment of this decade, and perhaps the most consequential of our century to date, was the debut of ChatGPT and the subsequent explosion of artificial intelligence.
As I noted, my profession as a writer makes me instinctively wary of these developments and the threat they pose to genuine human creativity and intellectual property rights. But my husband the engineer has of late gained the greater part of our household income through his work on A.I. development. This has put me in a rather odd spot. Can I complain about the threats posed by A.I. when I am actively benefitting from it?
There have been some tense discussions with the husband on this subject, but the result has not simply been a hardening of our positions. I am open minded enough to see the good that can come from A.I. as well. Already, it has been used to turbo charge medical research and aid people with disabilities. Practically every technology humans have created can be used for good or evil, and A.I. is no exception. The difference in this case is that A.I. bots are increasingly capable of making their own decisions absent human input, meaning that human motivation is no longer the only factor determining if a technology will be used ethically or not.
Artificial intelligence therefore presents both a tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity for humanity today. It is a sign of the times that Pope Leo XIV has chosen to make this a major focus of his papacy. He explained to the College of Cardinals that his selection of the papal name Leo was largely occasioned by the advent of A.I.
“There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her 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.”1
I was pleased to hear the pope say this, for it seems to me that the people driving this explosion in A.I. are not considering whether their technologies safeguard human dignity, justice, and labor. I see an increasingly wealthy handful of people at the top of American society who can get the government to do what they want, i.e. whatever will free them from regulations and increase their income. The most obvious example is Elon Musk, who is an official member of the Trump administration and promotes his own A.I. tool called Grok. But plenty of others are attempting to join the feast, even if they are not trumpeting their political views as loudly.
Pope Leo XIV is clearly a keen observer of global trends and wishes to use the ethical thought of the Roman Catholic Church to positively influence the way humans engage with A.I. Some may question whether he is in any position to do so. While A.I. is the essence of everything new, modern, and forward-thinking, the Church is very much a beacon of tradition, continuity, and cultural preservation. Few things demonstrate that fact as well as the recent conclave, with its antiquated ceremonies aimed at electing the successor to a man who lived two thousands years ago.
However, the new pope is convinced, and I happen to agree, that it is precisely this long history that the world needs to consider as it seeks to influence the future of humanity. For while some of the motivation behind the A.I. boom has been aimed at improving human lives, that does not explain the huge sums of money that have been invested in it. (Good luck getting such funding for Doctors Without Borders!)
No, A.I. is valued chiefly for its ability to boost the economy, ensuring greater profits for corporate behemoths. That is important to governments. The implications of A.I. for national defense are also far-reaching, and as with so many previous technologies, its development is justified by the belief that if we do not get there first, our enemies will, and they will therefore gain an advantage. (See, for example, the nuclear arms race of mid-20th century.)
But in one of his first official addresses to a large gathering of international journalists, the pope said the following:
“As you know, communication is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture, of human and digital environments that become spaces for dialogue and discussion. In looking at how technology is developing, this mission becomes ever more necessary. I am thinking in particular of artificial intelligence, with its immense potential, which nevertheless requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity. This responsibility concerns everyone in proportion to his or her age and role in society.”2
Hearing him make that statement, I found myself asking, “What exactly is it about A.I. that makes it a unique threat to what it means to be human?” After all, we have been relying on machines to lighten our workload for centuries. Why were we fine outsourcing manual tasks to machines but now balk at outsourcing mental tasks?
I believe our differing reactions can be attributed to our assumption that what is most uniquely human is rational thought. We proclaim that our ability to reason separates us from the beasts and makes us what we are. This may seems like an odd opinion for purported scientific materialists to embrace (for such we were all predicted to be by now), but that is where humanity stands at the present. We are able to think of ourselves as “minds in a vat.” We remake our bodies however we like. After all, our bodies are incidental to our humanity, or so we believe.
But what if we are wrong about that? What if our bodies are an equal part of who we are, and what we do to them and in them matters? Then the challenge of A.I. is little different than that of previous technological innovations: each one forces us to reconsider the nature of our humanity.
How can we outsource our work to machines without blaspheming our humanness? In truth, I believe that ship may have sailed some time ago. Don’t get me wrong: I am all for microwaves as much as the next person, but we are so dependent on machines at this point—specifically electronics and digital devices—that we struggle to envision how we could live without them. That represents a change in how we think about a human life: it cannot be lived without the assistance of machines. (Cue Alec Guiness lamenting, “They are more machines than men now, twisted and evil.”)
I do not know exactly how our embrace of A.I. will play out. I tend to discount the most dire prophecies and the sunniest predictions. But of one thing I am always certain: the poor will be the losers. Those with resources and connections are always better placed to navigate their way through times of change and to influence governments to act on their behalf. The poor are always the last to enjoy the benefits of technology. They have only God as their champion. Perhaps that makes them the most human of all.
The Luddites of early 19th century England smashed their machines rather than accept the further mechanization of the textile industry. How many of them did this because they felt the machines were an affront to their humanity, and how many because they knew it would mean fewer jobs at the mill? I cannot say. Their methods were perhaps unduly harsh, and the penalties for those deeds (including long imprisonment and execution) unwarranted. It was a strange episode, all in all. Yet, I cannot help feeling that it is a proper lesson for us today. We need not reject every new technology, but we ought to be asking the questions, “Do we really need this? If so, for what? And what does it say about our humanity?”
An online acquaintance of mine, the Christian writer Hannah Anderson, joked that the new pope seemed to have emerged via a deus ex machina. To which I could only reply that we were actually witnessing a leo contra machina: Leo against the machine, or if you prefer, the lion against the machine. I hope that Pope Leo XIV will say more about this issue in the coming years. I, for one, will be paying close attention.
NOTE: Sub-Creations is now on a brief hiatus to allow for a family vacation. Expect more articles sometime in June.
PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:
I was on the latest episode of the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast talking about my novel, Broken Bonds. Check it out here.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2025/may/documents/20250510-collegio-cardinalizio.html
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2025/may/documents/20250512-media.html
"The lion against the machine" - that's great. Would make an excellent title to an epic poem about the whole situation!
Thank you for the insightful discussion around the new pope. I share both your concern about AI and interest in Leo's (hopefully) studied response to it. Well done.