Article (Cheeky Half 41): Human dignity in the age of AI.
Most AI commentary settles into one of two registers. In the doomsday version, the technology is coming for the jobs, and the reckoning is overdue. In the utopian version, it is quietly delivering a new era of productivity and creativity, no real downside attached. Between them, these two registers account for most of what gets said about AI online, and the arguments repeat with enough regularity that they can start to sound less like insight than the same script read from a slightly different angle.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas,ยน published in mid-May and running to eighty-two pages across five chapters, arrives from well outside that script. Subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, it spends little time relitigating productivity or efficiency. Instead it grounds its entire position on AI in human dignity, described as infinite, unearned, and specifically not technological.
The clearest expression of that position is a call for disarmament, and a literal one. Autonomous weapons systems are increasingly involved in deciding who gets targeted in armed conflict, and the encyclical argues that this decision, who lives, should never belong to a machine. It is a specific, testable position in a debate that mostly produces abstractions.
The same logic extends to what the encyclical calls “post-human” and “trans-human” identity: entities that convincingly resemble a person without being one. Its position is that resemblance does not transfer dignity. However closely a system manages to sound, reason, or respond like a person, dignity remains something that cannot be earned through performance, and therefore cannot be approximated into existence.
There’s a case, though speculative, that this framing does something useful for the anxiety circulating under most AI commentary. Losing a job is a real loss, and a serious one. Losing a sense of one’s own humanity is a different kind of loss altogether, and the encyclical’s position is that the second cannot happen to begin with, regardless of what AI eventually manages to do. That distinction settles nothing economically, though it does relocate the fear somewhere more manageable.
None of this belongs exclusively to Catholic theology either. Various non-theistic worldviews, including several Indigenous frameworks, appear to ground human worth in comparably intrinsic terms, without reference to output or utility. And there’s an amusing irony worth naming here: summarising 82 pages about why AI can’t replace a human mind is, for obvious reasons, not a job best handed to AI.
Listen to Cheeky Half 41 of Leadership Decanted.
(Cheeky Half 40 “AI is not just a tool. It’s a reflection of who we are.” makes a good companion listen for anyone who wants to follow this thread further.)
Endnotes
- Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical (Holy See, 2026): https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html