“Do not renounce your ability to think.”
That sentence, offered almost in passing in a recent message by Pope Leo XIV on artificial intelligence, deserves to be read as more than a message from a religious leader. For me, it functions as a diagnosis. Not of technology itself, but of a growing human vulnerability—one that has become visible only because artificial systems now speak, listen, persuade, and respond with such ease.
The Pope’s message is striking for what it does not do. It does not condemn innovation or frame AI as an enemy. Instead, it focuses on something far more fragile and that’s the conditions under which human thought still feels necessary.
From Tools to Presence
Much of the Pope’s concern centers on a specific shift now underway. Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to tools that simply calculate or optimize. It increasingly presents, dare I say counterfeit, itself through faces and voices—speech, empathy, fluency, and continuous availability.
This is critical because faces and voices aren’t just neutral channels. They are the human-to-human interface. When AI mimics these forms, they don’t merely transmit information, they enter the psychological (and spiritual) space where reciprocal trust is formed.
The danger the Pope names isn’t just that AI deceive us outright, but that they feel right. They respond without demanding effort in return. In doing so, they reposition the human mind from participant to recipient.
When Effort Becomes Optional
The Pope warns against this renunciation. Against gradual surrender of the effort required to think. This is not a fall of intelligence, but a curious shift or reconditioning.
Large language models don’t encounter uncertainty as humans do. They move from point A to point B by completing patterns. When these techno-completions arrive human understanding can begin to feel inefficient if not unnecessary.
I believe that this is the cognitive shift at the heart of the Pope’s message. Thinking does not disappear but becomes less embodied and less owned.
Simulation at the Level of Relationship
A very contemporary part of the Pope’s message is his attention to simulated relationships. He notes the rise of systems that imitate engagement and affection with increasing sophistication—particularly through chatbots designed for sustained interaction. Here, the risk is not fantasy. It is substitution.
When technologies that don’t possess an interior life begin to occupy spaces once reserved for human discourse, the cost of real relationship becomes more apparent. It’s key to recognize that people are slower, less affirming, and less predictable. In essence, the human condition. And yet, it is precisely that friction—the often slow and imperfect encounter with another will—that forms the essence of humanity. To lose that friction doesn’t yield efficiency, it loses human formation.
The Marks That Thinking Leaves
Human thinking is rarely tidy. Our voices carry pauses and inflections, our writing shows revision, and faces bring our thoughts to the surface. These imperfections, if we dare call them that, aren’t noise around intelligence, but the record of a mind moving through thought and uncertainty.
AI offer something very different. Their outputs arrive smooth and nothing in them carries the trace of effort or doubt. There is no residue or by-product of arrival. It’s just the cold statistical reality of completion.
The essential contrast is that formation leaves marks. When thinking doesn’t leave any evidence of struggle, it risks becoming weightless. That’s not wrong, it’s unearned.
Danger Without Suppression
The Pope is careful not to call for the suppression of artificial intelligence. I feel that this restraint is important and correct. These technologies are fundamentally transformative and can support learning, expand access, and assist human work in powerful and meaningful ways.
Artificial Intelligence Essential Reads
But the absence of suppression does not imply the absence of danger.
Artificial intelligence is far from neutral and we need to be careful by calling it simply a tool. By simulating understanding, it may reshape what humans expect from thinking itself. Over time, it can erode the habits required for discernment. And this danger is cumulative. It doesn’t announce itself as failure. It arrives as convenience.
Reclaiming Human Thought
To “not renounce our ability to think,” as the Pope urges, is far from a rejection of technology and AI. It’s the refusal to trade effort for ease. Thinking has always required work and those demands are not obstacles to intelligence. They are what give it substance and value.
Undoubtedly, AI will continue to evolve. I argue that the more pressing question is whether we will continue to insist on the inner work that makes understanding our own and uniquely human. Tools can assist that work, but they can’t replace it without replacing something essential in us.
That is the warning embedded in the Pope’s message. It’s not that we will lose our minds to machines, but that we might surrender them willingly, one convenience at a time.
For more, see my forthcoming book, The Borrowed Mind: Reclaiming Human Thought in the Age of AI.