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Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.
Across the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. In 2023, the average number of births per woman worldwide fell beneath 2.1 — the minimum level necessary for averting population decline (also known as the “replacement rate”). And this collapse is not concentrated in just a handful of places; more than two-thirds of all nations now have below-replacement fertility.
While this crisis has been building for decades, its nature recently changed. In the 20th century, fertility fell primarily because couples started having fewer children. Now, it is falling mostly because fewer people are forming couples — or having sex at all.
If these trends continue, the consequences will be transformative — and possibly, catastrophic, as graying populations place unprecedented burdens on the remaining young. Vast countries will swiftly shrivel into city states. Today, Thailand is home to 63 million people. In two centuries, that will fall to 2 million, if the country’s current fertility rate persists.
These are just 23rd-century problems. If sustained indefinitely, today’s global fertility rate would ensure humanity’s extinction.
And it’s partly your phone’s fault.
Or so one leading theory goes. To make sense of recent fertility trends, some analysts have turned to the devices in their pockets. In the view of the journalist John Burn-Murdoch and social scientist Alice Evans, the smartphone helped birth the global spike in singledom.
Their argument goes (partly) like this: As smartphone ownership skyrocketed globally during the 2010s, more and more young people tapped into a vast, omnipresent trove of personalized entertainment, which reduced their incentives to socialize in person. When you have virtually every movie, TV show, and pornography ever made at your fingertips, you no longer need parties for stimulation or diversion. And when you have an X or Facebook account, you can participate in a public conversation — and experience communal recognition — without ever leaving the comfort of your goon cave.
Yet this withdrawal from in-person socializing reduces young people’s opportunities to meet romantic partners or develop social skills. Relationship formation falls as a result.
“The digital revolution has played a signal role in both degrading socialization for young adults and dividing young adults from one another,” Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, told me.
And that revolution is only just beginning. After all, the tech sector’s quest to make social isolation more appealing did not end with the advent of the iPhone, Netflix, or TikTok.
Since 2022, more than 1 billion people have gained access to an infinitely patient conversation partner — one who can speak knowledgeably about all of their interests and listen compassionately to all of their problems. Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, hermits can not only enjoy perpetual stimulation without social contact but also forms of emotional support that had previously required an intimate friend, family member, lover, or licensed therapist.
And these are the worst versions of these products we’ll ever see. Future iterations may take even more engaging forms; someday, Claude might be able to get it on.
This makes the “smartphone theory” one of the more important hypotheses of our time. If its narrative is correct — and there is some compelling evidence in its favor — then the fertility crisis is liable to deepen in the coming years. And AI might be replacing more than just our jobs.
Before digging into the “smartphone theory” of falling birth rates, it’s worth clarifying its scope.
No one thinks that digital technology is the primary cause of declining fertility, a trend that predates the iPhone by more than a century in wealthy countries (Swedish farmers did not start having fewer kids in the 1880s because of TikTok).
Rather, the main drivers of the long-term fertility descent appear to be foundational features of modernity: When scientific systems of healthcare and sanitation reduce child mortality, couples feel less compelled to have six kids in the hopes that three might survive. When industrial progress boosts the returns to education, parents have an incentive to invest more resources in each individual child’s development, making large families harder to sustain. And when women secure political rights, economic autonomy, and reliable contraception, fewer choose to spend decades of their lives perpetually pregnant.
Yet these structural forces only get us so far. Modern medicine, economic development, and women’s emancipation may have put humanity on the path to collapsing fertility. But some other factor recently sped us on our way: In the aughts, fertility rates actually plateaued globally and rose in advanced economies — before abruptly plummeting in the 2010s.
During that same decade, rates of singledom also spiked. In countries as varied as the United States, South Korea, Turkey, Tunisia, and Finland, young adults became less likely to have a romantic partner. And this “relationship recession” seems to have fueled the post-2010 drop in fertility. According to a 2025 study published in Nature, mothers in most high-income countries are having about as many children as they did decades ago. Yet fertility rates are falling nonetheless, due to a steep drop in the share of women who have any children at all.
The coupling collapse can’t be explained by a sudden expansion of women’s rights; it is happening even in deeply patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia. Nor is it easily attributed to economic turmoil; rates of romantic partnership have fallen in both high-growth and low-growth nations, advanced economies and developing ones, countries rattled by the 2008 crisis and those largely unharmed by it.
Smartphones, on the other hand, were in the right places at the right times.
In country after country, the rise in singles — and drop in birth rates — coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones, according to an analysis from Burn-Murdoch, the journalist at the Financial Times.
Correlation isn’t causation. But there’s reason to think this timing isn’t coincidental.
In one recent study, economists from the University of Cincinnati examined how teen fertility changed in different American and British localities as they gained access to 4G mobile networks. They found that the arrival of high-speed internet consistently accelerated declines in adolescent birth rates and conceptions. Their explanation for this phenomenon is straightforward: When the center of adolescent life moves online, in-personal socializing declines — and with it, opportunities for one thing to lead to another.
Time-use data lends credence to this theory. Across 21 European nations, the share of people who got together with their friends on a daily basis fell from 21 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2022. In the US, meanwhile, time spent on in-person social interaction has plunged during the smartphone era.
Taken together, these data points appear to tell a simple story: When humans acquire 24/7 access to social media platforms and unlimited digital entertainment, they feel less need to hang out with peers in the real world — and demand more from potential partners.
“When phones become ever more engaging and ever more exciting, then you want a super engaging person,” Evans, the social scientist, said. “He’s got to be better than an episode of Bridgerton.”
Thus, some retreat from the frictions of in-person socialization entirely. Others forfeit opportunities to hone their social skills or find suitable but imperfect mates. Sexlessness ensues.
It isn’t hard to see how AI could accelerate these trends.
Streaming and social media might have made the solitary life less dull and uncomfortable. But Pornhub won’t talk with you about your career anxieties, favorite Civil War battle, or debilitating fear of iguanas. And TikTok won’t provide discrete reassurance about that new mole on your chest. Before 2022, securing this sort of sympathetic ear typically required forging and sustaining real-world relationships.
But now, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT are happy to oblige.
Thus, if smartphones were outcompeting offline interaction before they hosted chatbots, they seem even better equipped to do so today.
Separately, AI may also widen the gap between young people’s romantic expectations and dating realities.
Frequent interaction with a chatbot — who perpetually centers your concerns, never loses patience, and always has something to say about your topics of interest — could encourage unrealistic standards for human conversation, particularly among those who’ve used AI intensively from an early age.
Of course, these are mere speculations. And research into AI’s impacts on in-person socialization and dating is limited. But there is some evidence that chatbots could be expediting young people’s drift towards solitude and sexlessness.
In a study published in 2025 from OpenAI and MIT, researchers tracked 981 participants’ use of AI chatbots over a four-week period. They found that subjects who voluntarily spent more time talking with LLMs during that span became more socially isolated by the study’s end.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that heavy chatbot use caused people to socialize less with other humans. After all, those who lack hangout opportunities might be more inclined to talk with chatbots. And yet, those who used AI intensively during the study had roughly as active social lives as other participants when the trial period began. Therefore, it seems likely that — at least in some cases — bonding with ChatGPT led to social isolation rather than vice versa.
Meanwhile, survey data suggest that people are turning to chatbots for companionship or romantic stimulation in growing numbers. In a 2025 poll from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, 19 percent of American adults — including 31 percent of young men — said they had chatted with an AI system meant to simulate a romantic partner.
More recently, the institute examined the use of these pseudo-significant others by young Americans in committed relationships. In its survey, 15 percent of young adults with human partners reported having a secret AI romantic relationship. And among this significant minority, more than 70 percent of men — and nearly 60 percent of women — agreed with the statement, “I wish conversations with my partner were like AI.” And more than half of both male and female users of AI companions said they wished their human partners “behaved like my AI.”
Perhaps more concerningly, respondents who used AI companions regularly were more likely to be in unstable relationships — in which they often thought that their partnership was in trouble, or discussed ending the relationship, or had broken up and gotten back together.
Once again, causality is difficult to determine. People in unstable relationships might be more inclined to seek artificial companionship. But chatbots’ influence on their users’ expectations are likely a factor, according to the report’s co-author Brian Willoughby.
“The more I talk to an AI companion that is always validating me, always taking my side, and always talking about what I want to talk about,” Willoughby said, “the more conversations with my real-life partner — who has their own views — will start paling in comparison to those AI interactions.”
And silicon substitutes for human intimacy will only grow more sophisticated and holistic in the coming decades. Or so many in and around the tech industry believe.
Daniel Faggella, founder of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, believes that advances in AI, virtual reality, and mechanized sex toys will eventually render human intercourse an obsolete pastime — one largely confined to nostalgists and connoisseurs, like driving stick shift.
“The great sexual organ is the brain,” Faggella told me. “If you have the visuals, the voice, the haptics, the sound, real-time biofeedback — and even very crude physical implements to go along with them — I think you’re going to beat the human flesh experience every time.”
I suspect that sex has more staying power than Faggella allows. But erotic AI doesn’t need to fully displace intimacy to accelerate the dating recession and fertility crisis. It merely needs to lure a sizable minority of men and women away from the hassle and heartbreak of human relationships. Judging by existing trends, superintelligent sexbots seem liable to meet that challenge.
AI’s effects on human sociality remain uncertain. In theory, artificial intelligence could benefit human relationships and fertility — by, for example, helping awkward adolescents refine their conversational skills or providing troubled couples with on-demand counseling.
Moreover, some experts question how much smartphones actually changed fertility trends. In the view of University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, the fundamental causes of the 2010s fertility collapse are long-term structural forces — among them, secularization, the “dissolution of old social networks,” and the rise of a service economy in which women’s relative economic power has increased.
Social media and streaming may have accelerated these processes, in Fernández-Villaverde’s view, by diffusing feminist ideas: Over the past decade, women in patriarchal societies have gained unprecedented access to commentary and dramas that affirm their desire for autonomy and idealize egalitarian marriages (Evans and Burn-Murdoch also put considerable weight on this dynamic). But he believes that this merely hastened already inevitable declines.
“Cellphones matter a little bit,” Fernández-Villaverde said. “But it’s not because people are spending their whole life playing Pokémon. It’s because they’re seeing what the rest of the world looks like and deciding that they want to do things differently.”
Nevertheless, it is clear that mass smartphone adoption coincided with falling in-person socialization — and rising singledom — in all manner of different countries. And there are some signs that AI is further displacing face-to-face interaction and distorting relationship expectations. In any case, the tech industry has a strong incentive to generate evermore compelling substitutes for human connection.
“Here in the Bay Area, all these startups are trying to make apps that will compete in the attention economy,” Evans said. “All these genius software engineers are trying to make something that hooks you in. So I’d predict that the market will enable AI to outcompete humans — they will be funnier, more charming, and enticing.”
At the very least, that possibility warrants concern, given the potential consequences for both fertility and human welfare.
If the past decade is any guide, technological progress may be speeding us toward a future of ubiquitous ghost towns, scarce children, and nursing homes full of gray-haired hermits, each passing their days with VR paramours as civilization slowly unwinds.
There are worse fates. But ideally, humanity would hold out for a better one.
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AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things.
That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 other experts in tech, biology, and national security policy — recently signed on to an open letter calling for more robust regulations around gene synthesis. They’re all concerned that AI systems might be used to help develop and even deploy dangerous biological weapons designed through gene synthesis, which is used to chemically build custom DNA sequences in a lab, rather than relying solely on existing natural DNA templates.
The simple fact of multiple CEOs of fiercely competitive AI companies aligning on anything is remarkable. But to understand how they came to this agreement, we have to take a step back to understand what gene synthesis is, how it works, and why the possibility of AI-assisted misuse of the technology generates so much fear.
Modern microbiology owes a lot to gene synthesis. Researchers can order synthetic genes from commercial DNA providers to develop new vaccines, drugs, and gene therapies for inherited diseases like hemophilia; produce human insulin, boost agricultural output, and more. Gene synthesis is a foundational technology for successful CAR-T cell therapies for cancer and many diagnostic tools. The demand for synthetic DNA is growing globally, and it’s never been cheaper or simpler to write genetic code.
But for all its power, gene synthesis also carries substantial risk. The same technology that can enable life-saving new gene therapies can also assist in the creation of deadly pathogens by assembling some of the same nucleotides — the genetic building blocks that create the code for all of life — in a different order.
Most US companies that provide gene synthesis services screen orders for genetic sequences of concern, such as those that can make a pathogen more dangerous or transmissible, and to verify that customers are legitimate. They do so voluntarily, well aware of the potential dangers.
But not every provider does so. “As long as screening remains voluntary, some companies will not do it,” Becky Mackelprang, the director for security programs at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, told me over email. There’s a real risk that bad actors could find a gene synthesis company with more lax standards, and that might mean disaster.
We’ve been fortunate so far. “This technology has been commercially deployed for more than 20 years and has never been misused to cause harm,” James Diggans, the vice president of policy and biosecurity at gene synthesis company Twist Bioscience, told me over email.
But AI threatens to complicate matters, opening up new frontiers of risk.
Both large language models (LLMs) and AI biodesign tools enable scientists to design entirely novel genetic sequences. This is a boon for industrial and medical applications — and a challenge for current screening systems, which use similarity to known pathogenic or toxic sequences in order to detect risk. A screening system should catch someone trying to order sequences of a known dangerous virus like Ebola, for example, but it might miss a new sequence that could still be risky. Last year, a study published in Science demonstrated that our screening systems have kept pace with AI capabilities so far. “But the industry clearly understands this will not be the case forever,” Diggans said.
Mackelprang is worried that AI could reduce the knowledge barriers that have historically prevented bad actors from developing bioweapons. Frontier AI systems, for example, seem to already outperform expert virologists on questions about performing complex laboratory procedures.
But there is knowing and there is doing, and biological lab work is still hard. “Researchers spend years trying to make a protocol work even after consulting directly with others who have perfected that exact same protocol. I think AI can help someone ‘level up’ their laboratory skills, but I do not think AI can enable someone without any biological training to create a serious hazard,” Mackelprang told me.
That means that gene synthesis companies are still a primary chokepoint for anyone trying to produce a novel genetic sequence. Mackelprang’s main concern is that aspiring bioterrorists might use AI to generate harmful genetic sequences that can evade current or future screening systems. “In the near term, I think the likelihood of these types of misuse are quite low. But when the potential consequences are severe and technologies continue to develop rapidly, we have a responsibility…to develop reasonable prevention and mitigation options,” she said.
Maximizing the benefits of gene synthesis while minimizing the risks is difficult, but not impossible. That’s why Diggans and Mackelprang — along with Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei, as well as other gene synthesis providers, tech entrepreneurs, life science executives, and national security experts — signed the open letter calling for mandatory gene synthesis screening and recordkeeping of orders.
Co-organized by the think tanks Institute for Progress and the Foundation for American Innovation, the open letter also calls for providers to record synthesis orders and sequence data to support biosecurity investigations “so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source…Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.” This would, ideally, address Mackelprang’s concern that AI might eventually help bad actors evade existing screening protocols.
“Screening every DNA synthesis order before it’s manufactured is the kind of unglamorous, common-sense step that prevents a much bigger problem later,” DJ Kleinbaum, the co-founder of the biotech startup Emerald Cloud Lab, an automated lab scientists can access remotely, and one of the signatories, said.
But Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei’s shared signatures may be the most meaningful evidence that the letter matters. For all their disagreements, they are well aware that their tools can be used for tremendous — even catastrophic — harm.
While it’s far from the first time frontier AI companies have spoken to AI-enabled biological risk, the open letter is the first place they’ve come together to do so in a single voice. “Support for screening does not depend on any particular view of AI,” the letter reads. “This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds.”
The letter calls for Congress to act now. “We applaud the legislative efforts currently underway,” the letter says, alluding to the bipartisan Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act, a bill that gives the Department of Commerce a year to develop new gene synthesis screening rules. The letter also suggests that US states should implement screening requirements based on federal and industry guidelines to create a unified national standard rather than an inconsistent set of laws.
The letter isn’t about applying biosecurity regulations to the AI companies themselves, which likely would have limited the number of tech signatories. (Though major companies do actively try to prevent their models from giving away dangerous biological knowledge, albeit not always successfully.) Focusing on screening is tractable, has the buy-in of several gene synthesis providers, and provides a concrete example of how AI can lower the barrier to doing both great and terrible things. And of course, it’s ultimately something a human being has to do at this point.
The AI companies are actively thinking about the catastrophic risks that their technologies might enable. Anthropic is hiring a technical chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threat investigator for its threat intelligence team. In May, after launching GPT-Rosalind, a frontier model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery, OpenAI introduced Rosalind Biodefense, a program that allows trusted developers to use GPT-Rosalind to build biodefense tools. On June 4, the day after the open letter went live, security specialists at OpenAI and Anthropic served as panelists at the Bipartisan Commission for Biodefense’s meeting on AI and biological threats.
But according to Twist Biosciences’s Diggans, the best way to defend against misuse of AI models to design harmful pathogens is to use AI models as defense. These defensive models can be used to detect attempted misuse before anything happens. DNA synthesis companies can employ these models to ensure orders for highly-engineered sequences are given the same scrutiny and evaluation as orders for naturally occurring sequences.
“[Gene synthesis] companies have to agree to have their order screened not just against a list of sequences but by an AI that people agree is smart enough to recognize and thwart an adversary who’s trying to build a deadly pathogen,” David Haussler, the scientific director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute and a signatory of the open letter, told me.
The good news is that this work is already underway. Last year, I reported that OpenAI provided $30 million in seed funding to biodefense startup Valthos, which develops frontier AI systems to detect biological threats and create medical countermeasures. Valthos’s co-founder Kathleen McMahon signed the open letter.
In September 2025, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and philanthropic nonprofit Sentinel Bio created the Pandemic Preparedness Engine AI platform (sometimes referred to simply as “the Engine”). They’re taking a biosecurity-by-design approach, considering biosecurity risks from the outset. “This includes a multi-layered approach to biosecurity: from protecting biosecurity-sensitive data needed to train the AI to carefully managing who has access to the Engine and monitoring how they use it,” Sarah Carter, a biosecurity consultant at CEPI, told me over email.
Users of the Pandemic Preparedness Engine would use AI prompts to interact with the system, similar to how people use consumer platforms. User prompts could be monitored in real time by a specialized AI agent built to assess the risk of misuse potential or attempts to “jailbreak” an LLM to get it to generate prohibited content, such as the “recipe” for assembling a deadly virus.
Still, even commercially available technologies may present problems of their own. This week, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, a version of its highly powerful and restricted Mythos model that the company has aimed to make safe for public use. Claude automatically stops use of Fable if it detects requests involving cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, or distillation (attempting to extract Claude’s capabilities to train competing AI models), shunting those requests to a less powerful model. Users have complained that trying to discuss biology for legitimate purposes with Fable 5 results in the model refusing to engage or defaulting to less capable models instead. The Fable example shows that it’s possible to overcorrect, limiting the potential upside of using AI for the life sciences.
“The major providers of LLMs are doing their best to prevent the models from answering questions that would enable somebody to do something dangerous,” Haussler told me. “[But] the end product of jailbreaking an LLM that’s capable of teaching you how to build a deadly virus is that you now have an LLM that’s capable of teaching anybody how to build a very dangerous virus. And we don’t want that to happen.”
It’s here that the letter’s signatories hope they can stop a still-simmering problem before it comes to a full boil. “Mandatory synthesis screening is that rare case where a threat is clearly visible and substantial prevention clearly achievable before any crisis has occurred,” said Richard Danzig, a natural security expert who served as the 71st Secretary of the Navy under former President Bill Clinton. “Opportunities to act in advance are unusual in this field. I think we should take this one.”
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Monday morning, the Roman Catholic Church made its biggest foray yet into the discourse on artificial intelligence and the role it should play in human life as the technology develops.
In the first encyclical of his papacy, titled Magnifica humanitas (Latin for “magnificent humanity”), Pope Leo XIV argued that AI is not intrinsically immoral, but that its adoption needed to be slowed in order to build moral guardrails, to establish better social safety nets for those displaced by economic and labor disruptions, and to create democratic processes that will ensure the public remains in control of these developments, rather than a small subset of tech oligarchs. The document also contended that the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence was a misnomer: Intelligence is something only human persons possess, and technology will never be human.
Encyclicals are official teaching documents of the Catholic Church: letters issued by popes to bishops after consultation with theologians, historians, and experts on pressing matters that affect humanity or the church, with the expectation that all people, faithful or secular, can learn from them and help shape their consciences and lives. Magnifica humanitas is Leo’s first encyclical since becoming pope last year, and its release now underscores the focus the new pope is putting on AI and technology. Notably, Leo also used the occasion to make a historic formal apology for the Church’s previous defense and justification of slavery — a reminder that the Catholic Church has not always been on the right side of social ills.
Though popes are traditionally not present during the release of these documents, which first began in the 18th century, Leo XIV was in attendance at its presentation, and delivered his own comments — something Vatican observers indicated reflected his desire to make sure the Church’s stance was properly understood. The Chicago-born pontiff spoke in English and was joined by AI experts and industry leaders, including Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, who consulted on the document.
So how should the public process and think about this new document? It’s helpful to first understand the context in which the Church is speaking up about this at all.
Magnifica humanitas is dropping more than a week after Pope Leo XIV actually signed it on May 15. The timing matters.
That day marked 135 years since the release of Rerum Novarum, the seminal work of Pope Leo XIII, the current pope’s namesake, who was leading the church during the late stages of the Industrial Revolution. As they are today, the faithful, and the clergy, were facing a rapidly changing world. And the Church, the world’s leading moral authority at the time, had yet to establish its place in it.
That 19th-century document made philosophical arguments about the relationship between labor and capital, warning about the perils of communism. But it also redefined the church’s relationship to the modern world, with the papacy reasserting itself as both a source of power and a moral authority in an era of rapid change. The encyclical set a template for how a 2,000-year-old institution could still remain relevant in a modern age.
In presenting this encyclical, Pope Leo XIV made this parallel clear. He sees the rise of artificial intelligence as the defining global challenge of the day, and of his pontificate: “Like the earlier Leo, I feel entrusted to look upon another huge transformation with eyes of faith, with lucidity of reason, with openness to mystery and with cries of the poor and the earth resounding in my heart,” the pope said while presenting his encyclical.
The newer encyclical builds off his predecessor’s tradition, and the various arguments popes have made about the importance of preserving the dignity of the human person and valuing modern technology only so long as it benefits everyone, not just its creators or the rich.
In 2015, Pope Francis, for example, wrote about “the technocratic paradigm” that has taken root in modern capitalism: the sense that technological progress is unstoppable, that it will demand unlimited concessions from nature and from people, and that the world had no choice but to submit to change.
“Leo is concerned that we don’t just submit to inevitability on questions of AI, but ask critical questions and push back in ways that are necessary before it’s too late to push back, before damage is done that can’t easily be undone,” Dan Rober, an associate professor of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, told me.
That role of questioning, pausing, and coming to consensus has defined the Catholic Church’s leadership and operation for the last two papacies: the notion of synodality, or teaching and making decisions based on consensus. Before AI and the technologists who have created it become the sole determinants of how politics, the economy, and society operates, the Church is asserting itself as a counterweight — even as it includes some of those leaders in the process.
“Pope Leo is trying to clearly walk in those footsteps, and I think he’s very concerned, as are a lot of people, about the possible implications, particularly for job markets and for people’s lifestyles being sustainable day to day with the rise of AI systems that may render a certain significant amount of jobs able to be automated very rapidly,” Rober said.
This kind of reflection has become standard procedure for the Vatican. Since at least the turn of the century, the Church has found itself increasingly weighing in on the crises of the day, albeit often a bit too late.
As the Catholic writer Christopher Hale has noted, “Francis took up the climate fight with Laudato Si in 2015, after decades of scientific consensus had been ignored. Benedict XVI took up the global economic order with Caritas in Veritate in 2009, after the financial system had already collapsed. Both documents arrived in the long shadow of the crises they addressed.”
In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV may be seeking to intervene early in the development or takeover of a new technology this time, and show that the Church wants to both work with Silicon Valley and assert itself as a powerful defender of modern values, as it has done in its defense of the liberal international order and aspects of humanism, like human autonomy and reason.
In the background, there’s also a more sci-fi element: the notion that AI could end up coming between the Church and the people — serving as a filter or layer between regular people and God, and perhaps even usurping the role of the Church itself. The Catholic Church, famously, is concerned with the proper interpretation of scripture, Biblical truths, ethics, and God. Bloody wars waged and hard-fought reformations turned on this central question of who and how one can commune with God. Now, AI enters as another middleman.
“That’s closely related to the question of people using AI as a therapist,” Rober told me. “You could see a way in which AI becomes its own kind of religion, and certainly the way a lot of the Silicon Valley founders talk about it, it does have religious overtones to it. You listen to the Google founders talk about the singularity, and that sounds a lot like religion.”
It’s in this context that this document, and its specific teachings, lands.
Magnifica Humanitas is not the Vatican’s first examination of the role of AI in modern life.
Just last year, in the twilight of Pope Francis’s pontificate, the Vatican released a teaching note, Antiqua et nova, that laid the groundwork for Leo’s encyclical. That 2025 document established that the Church is not opposed to the development of AI: technological progress and scientific discoveries are part of the natural way that humans are meant to honor God, his creation of humanity in his image, and the natural outpouring of God’s gift of reason and rationality.
But it also established a distinction between human intelligence and machines that analyze data and perform processes. It insisted that artificial intelligence, like all technology, should serve humanity, not the other way around. And it emphasized the risk that new technology poses to the ability to, right to, and dignity of work, especially for the least well off in society.
In the encyclical, Leo uses the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel — a warning about human hubris — to make this case: “We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak,” he writes. “The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.”
This builds off of a long tradition of focusing on not just the dignity of work and workers, but also more recent concerns that modern capitalism facilitates a “throwaway culture” that views people and things as, at best, cogs in the service of a greater machine.
“He wants to talk about the idea that our humanity is meaningful in and of itself and that work is part of that, even if AI systems are able to allow for more leisure and even if something like universal basic income were to be made available, people need to find to have work of some kind to have meaning in their lives,” Rober said.
The encyclical’s teachings can be broken up into three broad categories: regulations on how AI is developed and how individuals adopt it, the responses required to handle the economic effects of AI, and limits on AI’s usage in war.
The practical recommendations and concerns Leo outlines include:
From an eagle-eye view, the document is fairly wonky and detailed: concerned with very practical matters and specific recommendations that could have come from academia, or a secular background — underscoring just how much Leo may hope it can provide guidance for leaders and individuals, as opposed to remaining siloed to the intellectual class. So as this technology continues to develop, the pope and the church want to help shape it. They want the faithful to be reminded that whatever AI offers is not reality, not personhood, and not God. It is a tool that should not dominate or determine the lives of its users. And it should not replace the role of the Church in teaching morality and ethics.
For the greater secular world, the Church wants to remind the public that they should have a say in how AI shapes their world; they should not allow business and tech leaders to define the terms of existence through their machines; and that they have a powerful ally in the Roman Catholic Church in the effort to preserve human dignity in the face of unprecedented technological change.
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