Devolution makes corruption likelier
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, stands explicitly in the tradition of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum 135 years ago. Both seek to uphold the dignity of human work in the age of the machine. The present Leo warns eloquently against building the Tower of Babel rather than, like Nehemiah, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem by cooperation. He does not, however, engage fully with the discussion of what AI – and particularly AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – might be. The Pope proposes his ‘civilisation of love’, but the promoters of AGI themselves claim to be conducting ‘a civilisation experiment’. If AGI can discern patterns in an infinity of data which the human mind cannot, will it produce a new understanding of nature, a theory of everything?
