{"id":669156,"date":"2026-05-28T01:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T01:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/669156\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T01:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T01:26:10","slug":"opinion-pope-leos-a-i-vision-might-not-be-strange-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/669156\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Pope Leo\u2019s A.I. Vision Might Not Be Strange Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early in Pope Leo\u2019s encyclical<\/a> on artificial intelligence, \u201cMagnifica Humanitas,\u201d he warns against \u201cthe misconception\u201d of equating the intelligence of machines with the consciousness of human beings. In a document that largely avoids antitechnological anathemas, it\u2019s notable, if unsurprising, how emphatically Leo closes the door on the imputation of personhood to any version of A.I.:<\/p>\n

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. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.<\/p>\n

But on the day this papal declaration was issued, it was gently contradicted by one of the pope\u2019s invited guests. Chris Olah, a founder of the A.I. giant Anthropic, was one of the respondents to the encyclical\u2019s presentation in Vatican City, and his brief remarks<\/a> portrayed his company\u2019s creations less as a tool than as a child \u2014 \u201cnot the cold, calculating robots we were promised\u201d but beings \u201cmade from us, from our words,\u201d through a process \u201ca little like bringing a fictional character to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olah did not explicitly claim that Anthropic\u2019s Claude was becoming conscious, but he suggested that we should take the possibility seriously:<\/p>\n

I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models \u2014 what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don\u2019t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.<\/p>\n

In the difference between the pope and the researcher, you can see one distillation of a great A.I. debate: To what extent should we expect A.I. to ultimately be a normal technology<\/a> in its nature and effects?<\/p>\n

Calling A.I. normal does not imply that it is unimportant or that it won\u2019t reshape the world. It just means that it will be revolutionary in the way the telephone or the personal computer or the internet was revolutionary, instead of, say, rapidly doubling human life spans or eliminating scarcity or enabling a successor species of machines to wipe us out. And it implies that the usual ways in which we approach a new technology \u2014 competition and innovation, regulation and adaptation \u2014 are appropriate to the A.I. age and we can debate them without fearing that the ground will suddenly dissolve beneath our feet.<\/p>\n

Right now the two governments most intimately involved with A.I. \u2014 the Trump administration and the Politburo in Beijing \u2014 are on the normal-technology side of the debate. China seems more firm in its conviction, which is why it purports to be comfortable lagging American companies in the race for the A.I. frontier. But the White House, too, believes that it is engaged in a contest for technological advantage in which fears of machine gods and A.I. doom are mostly flights of fancy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early in Pope Leo\u2019s encyclical on artificial intelligence, \u201cMagnifica Humanitas,\u201d he warns against \u201cthe misconception\u201d of equating the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,265750,181,507,292156,275184,292155,91901,151912,74],"class_list":["post-669156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic-ai-llc","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-encyclicals","tag-leo-xiv","tag-popes","tag-regulation-and-deregulation-of-industry","tag-roman-catholic-church","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}