Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Society, Technology

Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI should be welcomed

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS

Intro: Magnifica Humanitas is an important warning of the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. Silicon Valley is wrong to dismiss it

When authors and creative writers are asked whether novels of the future will be written by AI, it’s not so much a question as a provocation. Do many worry that a machine can do what they do, only better? As Francine Prose, a prominent American writer and academic says: “No algorithm is going to write Anna Karenina!” which is also not a real answer.

Many will be grateful to Pope Leo XIV, the American pontiff, for his recently issued letter to the world, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a long (more than 40,000 words), intelligent, and thoughtful encyclical in which the pope addresses the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. For anyone seeking an opinion on AI, they might like to be referred to the pope’s letter, or at least chapter three.

The encyclical begins with an appropriately biblical reference to the tragic consequences of a breakdown in human communication. Humanity faces a “pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build a city in which God and humanity dwell together”. What follows is a detailed account of the evolution of the views of Pope Leo’s predecessors, of the Church’s ideas about labour, authority, government, science, power, and our moral obligation to one another. It cites the work that the Church has done in defence of human dignity and freedom.

The third chapter concerns Technology and Dominance. The Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI, delivers on the promise of the encyclical’s title. In an eloquent (and most often quoted) passage explaining what AI is not, the pope essentially defines what it means to be human. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” AI does not have a moral conscience nor does it show any guiding concern for the greater human good.

The letter proceeds to say the most important and necessary things about what is possibly the greatest threat posed by AI: it can be programmed solely to maximise profit, a situation that can only result in the suffering of the many for the benefit of the few. The pope warns against the “manipulation of privacy” and the “misuse of information”, against the uses of an algorithm to manage employment, to control access to public services and credit, and to elevate or damage one’s personal reputation.

Compassion, mercy, and forgiveness – not high on the machine’s list of priorities – will become obsolete. “‘Necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of the supposed optimisation of the species.” If the tools of this new power are placed in the hands of those who already possess wealth and influence, they will be used to elevate the comfort, health, and wellbeing of our wealthiest and most privileged citizens.

As the letter nears its end, the pope calls on us to remain faithful to the truth, to invest in education, to cultivate relationships, to live in justice and peace – to resist the way in which the new technologies can “exploit the most vulnerable, create new forms of slavery and derive profit from conflict”. What becomes clear is that the pope is not condemning AI outright but rather the way it can be used as a tool of political repression and as a guarantee of worsening economic inequality.

In theory, it’s possible to criticise the encyclical for not going far enough, for not using another biblical metaphor – the golden calf – to stigmatise the use of AI because of how it prioritises cost-saving over spiritual, individual, and communal growth. But that ship has already sailed, and there’s not much that Leo XIV – or any religious leader – can do to condemn the new advances as a 21st-century form of idolatry.

Even so, the encyclical’s vision of human nature, of the spirit of justice and empathy that needs to prevail, of the essential importance of the highest moral values – is ultimately so beneficent, so positive, so generous, so inarguably clear about our obligation to protect the weak and the poor, that it’s hard to find reasons to dismiss it.

And yet that’s the scary part. Apparently there’s been a certain amount of blowback from Silicon Valley, where the inventors and masters of the latest technology have suggested that the pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Jeremy Nixon, a founder of AGI House, a group dedicated to proving that AI is essentially equal to the human brain, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the Church hadn’t “thought deeply about . . . AI”, adding: “They couldn’t have a position on it, because they don’t understand it.” And there seems to be a widespread belief that the end product of the current research will be, in effect a new God, or at least a convincing simulacrum. Concerned about the perils of the future, our society is choosing to overlook the evidence that the downsides of AI are already upon us. Many undergraduates in marketing and advertising are acutely aware that by the time they graduate, all the jobs in advertising will have been taken by AI.

If the masters of this new technology fail to agree with what the pope sees as its dangers and drawbacks, we are in very deep trouble indeed. The problem is not that we will have a robot writing Anna Karenina. The problem is that no one will see any possible need for a novel that so exquisitely portrays the sufferings of a woman, a singular human being.

There would be no point in a book like that unless that account of a life-changing mistake could be monetised by a forward-thinking tech bro and used to finance the purchase of a bigger and better yacht, presumably serviced by a permanent underclass, by workers whose dignity – whose formerly valued and valuable jobs – have been pirated by the rapacious manifestations of artificial intelligence.

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Artificial Intelligence, Society, Technology

AI is spiralling out of control: it can be stopped

ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE

Intro: East and West collaborated to end nuclear proliferation – it is time to do the same for the latest advancing technology. Washington and Beijing must come together to rein in AI’s growing threat

After the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the edge of nuclear war, global powers embarked on a concerted effort to pull it back from the brink. The non-proliferation treaty (NPT) of 1968, which limited the spread of nuclear weapons, has been a resounding success. Only a handful of countries today have access to the 80-year-old technology and those that do have not used it.

In the decades since, no technology has proved as dangerous as nuclear weapons as to require international co-ordination.

Now, however, many believe that the advance of artificial superintelligence requires a similar global effort to prevent an AI-led disaster.

Anthropic, the world’s most valuable AI company, has called for a mechanism to slow down or pause the development of advanced AI. It has warned that the technology could get out of control sooner than many think.

The company believes it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. It says it would “likely be a good thing” if development could be delayed.

Anthropic – recently valued at $965bn (£720bn) – said it had raised the alarm because it believed AI was improving much faster than our ability to understand and control the systems.

Within the company itself, bots are not just writing code; they are also ordering around other bots and even carrying out their own research. Before long, AI could be building itself, a process called recursive self-improvement. This could start a feedback loop in which progress goes parabolic.

Sceptics insist this is just mere marketing. Anthropic has announced that it has filed for an initial public offering and is expecting a value in excess of $1tn. What could be more valuable than a technology so powerful that world leaders need to rein it in? AI that builds itself has been a premise the company has used to raise money for years.

David Sacks, a high-profile critic of Anthropic, and Donald Trump’s former AI tsar, suggested the warning was an attempt to secure a public bailout, implying it was a sign of getting the frontier AI lab nationalised.

Nonetheless, concerns about powerful AI are becoming increasingly prominent. Anthropic has kept its most powerful AI system, Mythos, out of public hands because of its ability to find security flaws in critically important computer systems.

Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, has raised the alarm about AI crashing the financial system and has warned that Mythos meant “things that we thought might happen in the next year, two years, three years or four, have now come right into the foreground”.

AI labs fear that the next generation of models will be good enough to help terrorists develop bioweapons.

If AI were to start building itself without human oversight, it would by definition become much more difficult to control. In the extreme scenarios that safety experts are concerned about, AI’s goals become detached from our own, forcing it to eliminate humanity through evolution so that we do not get in the way.

There are those who dismiss this idea as sci-fi nonsense. But supporters of a pause say even a tiny chance of extinction should be enough to make us consider how to stop it.

Establishing the need for a pause would be the easy part. Making it happen is another matter altogether. If he so wished, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, could send everyone home today and shut down his company. At best, though, this would delay the rise of powerful AI by a couple of months. Its two major rivals, Google and OpenAI, are not far behind. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has said that it too sees “early signs of RSI [recursive self-improvement] in today’s systems”.

It added: “We expect this to increase competitive pressures among developers and nations, and create governance challenges that existing institutions are not equipped to address.”

Even if the US government ordered all three to stop work on AI, this might only cede ground to China, whose companies are typically seen as being just three to six months behind the US.

Earlier this year at the World Economic Forum, Amodei said: “The reason we can’t [slow down] is because we have geopolitical adversaries building the same technology at a similar pace… It’s very hard to have an enforceable agreement where they slow down and we slow down.”

Practically, it would require a government-level agreement and the two nations that matter are the US and China. This sort of agreement would require Trump and Xi Jinping to co-operate on a pause, something that looks far from likely given both have compared AI to a race.

Xi has said that China must “gain a head start and secure a competitive edge” in AI, while a Trump administration action plan states that “America is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence”.

It has also emerged that the National Security Agency have been using Mythos to carry out cyber-attacks. This suggests the US government is making enthusiastic use of the latest systems instead of fearing their consequences.

Pessimists often compare the technology and its potential consequences to nuclear weapons, but the two are nothing alike.

The destructive capabilities of atomic warheads are undisputed, whereas AI’s safety risks can appear nebulous. The latter’s upside may also be significant: its supporters believe it can cure disease, lead to interstellar space travel, and make work optional.

What is more, pressing pause on the AI race is not without its own set of risks. Suspending work on AI could cause an economic crash. The chips and data centres that AI relies on have driven a stock market boom that has helped sustain the US economy. Inhibiting demand for them could do the opposite.

There have been signs that China and the US are changing tack. The White House has raised the alarm about Mythos and Trump has just signed an executive order calling for AI models to be reviewed before release.

Beijing has called for a “global AI governance framework” to rein in the technology. This is miles away from the global deal Anthropic has called for, but campaigners have taken it as a positive sign.

The political zeitgeist can move very quickly. The US and its allies have succeeded to a certain extent in deterring nuclear proliferation. To do so similarly with AI is going to be hard, but as we have seen with nuclear weapons, global governance can come together and work for the common good.

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Arts, Books, Literature

Book Review: Land by Maggie O’Farrell

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Set in the decades after the Great Hunger, “Land” is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule

Cartography has never been a neutral discipline. Maps offer a partial view of a landscape, informed by what the mapmaker wishes the reader to see. A colonising army will mark the features of the terrain that serves its purposes and exclude inconvenient signs of prior habitation. And they will do this in their own language.

“Land”, Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, is set in Ireland in the 1860s. It has been more than a decade since the Great Hunger killed over a million people and forced an even higher number into exile, and the landscape is dotted with empty villages and over-full graves. Tomás – an Irish cartographer working for the British “redcoats” – and his young son, Liam, are charting a remote peninsula on the country’s west coast when Tomás has a sudden, revelatory experience at a pre-Christian holy spring.

What he encounters there inspires him to abandon his office job and counter the efforts of his erstwhile employers by drawing his own, dissident map of the area. It will reconstitute the terrain as its inhabitants understand it, in their language, honouring the communities that have been annihilated, the woods and waterways that rightly belong to them, and the old cultural landmarks the British have no use for.

The task, for Tomás, is personal: both he and his wife, Phina, were orphans of the Hunger, forced from their rural lives into urban workhouses. He moves his family from Dublin to the countryside as an act of reclamation and renewal. Phina, however, is more ambivalent. She worries about money now that her husband has foregone his regular salary, and about her daughters’ future prospects given that in their new village Catholic schooling is reserved for boys.

Like much of the author’s previous work, including her most famous, the 2020 book “Hamnet” – adapted into a 2025 film by Chloé Zhao – “Land” is a historical novel with O’Farrell’s signature interest in absorbing family relationships. The first half of the narrative sows the seeds of a defiant, multigenerational reckoning with the British Empire, and to an extent the Catholic Church. We encounter a windswept landscape; a menacing, nameless viscount; a kindly widow who represents all the grieving folk of the land; and a condescending priest. O’Farrell takes us on a lively deep dive into the land’s prehistory – a place of hill forts, druids, wanderers and wolfhounds, where virgins are ritually sacrificed to stave off bad weather.

Great period novels balance larger historical context with personal details and textures, and at first “Land” feels poised to do just that, deftly situating a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s centuries-long struggle against British rule.

But as the novel proceeds, this promise largely dissolves. Tomás’s cartographic ambitions, initially presented as the story’s engine, fall from focus as the story shifts to his children’s comings of age and their own varied relationships to the Irish diaspora across the British Empire.

Unfortunately, O’Farrell leaves these relationships and their wider ramifications mostly unexplored. Liam joins the Jesuits and travels as a missionary to South India, where he briefly considers the connection between his role and that of the British in Ireland, but ultimately loses his faith because of homesickness rather than any true engagement with the locals’ plight.

– A sweeping historical family saga set primarily in post-Famine Ireland. The novel blends themes of cartography, colonialism, family bonds, and the deep connection between people and the land

His sister Enda journeys to Quebec on an emigration permit she’s stolen from Liam, and struggles to make a living there as a domestic labourer and street musician. She meets her love interest in the immigration line: an Eastern European teacher turned cook who picks up work as a logger in the summers to make enough money to bring the rest of his family to Canada. But the novel pulls its punches when it comes to the parallels between deforestation in the Americas and that in Ireland.

Nonetheless, O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and luscious throughout, and there are some emotive and moving passages told from the perspective of Phina’s nonverbal youngest child, Eugene. But the problems with “Land” stem from its reluctance to question the moral clarity of its core characters. They are all unimpeachably good. Tomás loses his grip on reality, and their other daughter, Rose, resents her siblings for leaving her behind on the peninsula; but the real darkness in the novel lies outside the family unit – with the redcoats, the viscount, and the church. The evils of imperialism do not require its victims, real or imagined, to be pure and incorruptible, especially when their own migrations make them the dominant presence in other colonies.

At its best, “Land” evokes weighty, time-slip novels like Alan Garner’s “Red Shift”, drawing associative lines across eras and grappling with the long afterlives of colonial violence. But there is no doubt it is deflated by characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too shallow to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel poses at the start.

– Land by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Knopf (an imprint of Penguin), 384pp

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