As Artificial Intelligence Reshapes the World, Pope Leo Reaches for Ancient Scripture
When a South Korean go champion lost to a computer in 2016, he walked onto the stage afterward and apologised, not just for himself, but for humanity. In that moment, entrepreneur and AI specialist Premesh Chandran first truly understood what artificial intelligence means for the human condition.
The story opened a wide-ranging discussion on Questions for the Modern World, a podcast hosted by Stefan Gigacz and recorded in partnership with the Australian Cardijn Institute. Three guests — a media technologist, a Catholic social teaching scholar and a biblical scholar — reflected on Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first major encyclical, which takes artificial intelligence and its consequences for human society as its central concern.
Their conversation touched on junior architects, robot armies, the Book of Revelation, and whether the “human in the loop” has already become a polite fiction.
A Ladder With No Bottom Rungs
Premesh described a project in which AI was deployed to check architectural drawings for a 23-storey condominium, 800,000 individual design elements. Human teams, working for months, still produced error rates above 10 percent. The AI brought that figure to 99.9 percent.
“From an architecture point of view, this is great,” he said. “But from a human point of view, it displaces a lot of junior architects.”
That displacement, he argued, is not a future concern. It is happening now, and it is happening at the bottom of the career ladder, among the people who were supposed to be learning. The entry points are disappearing. The gains are flowing upward.
Premesh was equally direct about the concentration of power. AI is not only automating tasks. It is consolidating decision-making authority in the hands of a small number of technology companies and governments capable of operating at scale. With the advent of robotics, he warned, the displacement would extend from digital labour to physical labour within two to five years.
On the question of accountability, he dismissed what he called the “human in the loop” argument, the idea that requiring human sign-off on AI decisions provides a meaningful check. “The human is intimidated to just tick that box,” he said, “without even reviewing what is actually being implemented at scale.” He called instead for laws capable of redistributing both power and profit, and said the Catholic Church had a role to play in building that coalition across faith traditions.
A Moment of Extraordinary Uncertainty
Redemptorist Bruce Duncan CSsR, a scholar of Catholic social teaching, placed the encyclical in its political context: wars in Gaza and Ukraine, an American president he described as doing significant damage to the international economic order, and a rapid militarisation of European defence. He noted the encyclical’s treatment of just war, and its implicit suggestion that the language of just war has too often been used to justify conflicts that did not meet its criteria.
“Concern for the poorest, the most vulnerable people, the weak, the sick — this is a central demand of the Gospel,” Duncan said. “It’s a central obligation of Catholics, of all Christians, and indeed people of goodwill, whoever they are.”
The inequality critique at the heart of Magnifica Humanitas, he observed, is not new. Much of it was already present in Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti. The concentration of wealth, the obligation to the poor as a central demand of the Gospel, the call to extend solidarity beyond Catholic enclaves, these are positions with deep roots in Vatican social thought. What may be different now is the messenger. Leo XIV, as an American pope, may reach audiences his predecessor could not, especially in the United States where the power of AI tech resides.
The Pope, the Tower, and the Walls That Were Never Closed
Stuart, a biblical scholar, came to the encyclical with a different question: how would a new pope use Scripture?
What he found surprised him. Rather than the proof-texting that has characterised older Vatican documents, isolated verses deployed to support conclusions already reached, Leo XIV built the entire encyclical around two powerful and somewhat unexpected biblical images.
The first is the Tower of Babel, from Genesis: humanity’s attempt to build vertically toward heaven, to seize something of the divine, to become more than human. “People become a means to a technological end,” Stuart said, describing how Leo reads the story. The second is Nehemiah, the largely overlooked Old Testament book — better known in Jewish tradition, where it holds the prominent position of the final book of the Hebrew Bible — about the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls after the Babylonian exile.
Where Babel represents hubris and dehumanisation, Nehemiah offers a contrasting image: a collective project brought first to prayer, placed within rather than against a larger plan. It blends institutional responsibility with individual duty, a balance that runs through the encyclical itself.
But Stuart noted an ambiguity in the Nehemiah image that he believes Leo himself recognised. Walls protect. They also exclude. The book of Nehemiah contains streaks of exclusion toward foreigners that sit uneasily with the encyclical’s broader vision.
Which is why, Stuart argued, Leo reaches for a third image — the New Jerusalem from the final chapter of Revelation. A city with walls of extraordinary scale, and gates that are never closed.
Genesis. Nehemiah. Revelation. The beginning of the Christian Bible, the end of the Jewish Bible, the end of the Christian canon. Stuart was not certain whether Leo intended that architecture. But it is there.
“The construction of the City of God,” Stuart said, “is not ultimately just up to us.”
What the Church Can Do
The three conversations kept circling back to the same tension: the problems are structural, the solutions feel personal. Laws are too slow. Corporations are too fast. And yet each speaker resisted despair.
Premesh put it plainly. The church, he said, cannot write the code or regulate the companies alone. But it can build the coalition ,across faiths, across borders, that makes regulation politically possible. That is not a small thing.
Duncan framed it in Gospel terms. The command to love your neighbour was never meant to be comfortable. The neighbour in the parable was a foreigner, beaten on the road, attended to by a stranger. That is the standard Leo XIV is invoking.
And Stuart, the biblical scholar, offered perhaps the most honest note to end on. The New Jerusalem in Revelation is not built by human effort alone. It is given. Which means the weight of fixing everything does not fall entirely on us, but the call to act, within whatever circle we inhabit, does.
As Leo XIV himself wrote, borrowing from Tolkien’s Gandalf: we cannot choose the time we are born into. We can only decide what to do with the time that is given to us.
Matthew Howard, Common Home TV.
This article was written based on the transcript of the podcast “Scapegoat!”, with the help of artificial intelligence and editorial assistance.
source: commonhome.tv
