Following his election, Pope Leo XIV linked his name to the social challenge we are facing of Artificial Intelligence. There are several reasons for this, but the main one traces back to the fact that Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social problems that arose in the context of the first great industrial revolution. Today the Church offers its heritage of social doctrine in response to a new industrial revolution and developments in artificial intelligence, which present new challenges in the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.
In the Note “Antiqua Et Nova” Pope Francis is credited with this observation, “The data so far seem to suggest that digital technologies have served to increase inequalities in the world. Not only differences in material wealth, which are also important, but also differences in access to political and social influence.”
The Vatican document goes on to make these observations, “In this sense, AI could be used to prolong situations of marginalization and discrimination, to create new forms of poverty, to widen the ‘digital divide’ and exacerbate social inequalities. Moreover, the fact that most of the power over major applications of AI is currently concentrated in the hands of a few powerful companies raises significant ethical concerns.”
The Church highlights the socio-economic risks associated with the adoption of AI in production contexts, pointing out that the current technological approach tends to subordinate human labor to the logic of efficiency and automation, rather than employing AI as a lever to enhance human capital. The systematic replacement of human labor with intelligent systems may in fact generate regressive effects, including job de-skilling, increased precarity, automated surveillance, and depersonalization of work roles.
Moreover, it points out the danger of an asymmetric concentration of economic benefits, where a few dominant players in the digital market can gain disproportionate advantages, to the detriment of social cohesion and employment inclusion. This process fuels a technocratic view of the production system, which tends to marginalize the economically underperforming players and assign value only to measurable efficiency, eroding the recognition of work as a relational, identity and community asset.
The Church proposes a vision of AI oriented toward ethical and economic anthropocentrism, where technological innovation must be designed to enhance the dignity of work and support human decision-making autonomy, rather than supplant it. Work is conceived not only as a means of livelihood, but as a channel for integral human development, and therefore the design and implementation of AI must maintain the promotion of quality employment, social security, and pay equity as a central goal.
Italiano