Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?

For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating

That's a demand for AI regulation.

Then take the paragraph that starts with:

> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]

The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.

Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?

All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.

I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:

https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...

Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.

You can be both a victim and a bully, it's not mutually exclusive. A scam artist can get mugged or burglarised, and so on. In general, in civilised countries, being a horrible person does not prevent someone from being recognised as a victim.

I wouldn't even bother reading whatever they wrote.

Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, but that was from memory, and, as you've noted, it's "Chapter 3". I agree there's a run in this where he gets pretty prescriptive! But I still think "policy document" is the wrong way to ready this.

Leo goes way out of his way, in the tradition of all Catholic popes over the last century, to ground what he's saying in a long through-line of doctrine. So in both your quotes, about the need for regulation: it's not really about policy.

I think Leo is first espousing a normie view (neither especially "left" nor especially libertarian) about regulation and risk, and then using it as an object lesson about the Catholic principle of Participation. Catholicism is big on ordering and prioritizing relationships between humans. We are supposed to be making decisions together for the Common Good, and we are supposed to recognize that decision-making happens (must happen) at different levels, from the state to local communities to families (this is Subsidiarity).

I flinched at the intellectual property bit too. But the point he's making in context is clear; it's Catholic and Christian doctrine going all the way back to Genesis. The literal named principle "Universal destination of goods" goes back to Vatican 2. The "codification" of these principles happened under Benedict XVI, not my favorite pope (I'm much more to the left than you are) and obviously no squish.

I think you're reading too much American politics into this, for what it's worth. Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which was was in part a reaction to Marxist/Socialist thought and totalizing class conflict, recognizes the importance of worker welfare and the dignity of labor, but very specifically does not reject private property (private property is a necessary precondition for the agency of the family unit, which is central to Catholic doctrine). If we dig in I think we'll quickly find a lot of ideas that a doctrinaire leftist would recoil from!

But my big point is that people are all excited to read the Vatican's AI policy document, and the Vatican is uninterested in publishing AI policy; what it wants to do is continue to indoctrinate Catholics on the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, The Common Good, Human Dignity.