In the spring of 2026, Rome sent out an old kind of message.
An encyclical.
Pope Leo XIV chose May 15 to sign his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The date was not accidental. One hundred and thirty-five years earlier, Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum on the same day, inserting the Catholic Church into the social wreckage of industrial capitalism. This time the machinery is different. Steam engines have become neural networks. Factories have become data centers. But the historical gesture is unmistakable: another technological revolution has arrived, and institutions that usually move slowly have decided that waiting is no longer an option.
Many observers read this as religion reacting to technology.
I think it is closer to the opposite.
Religious institutions rarely win by moving quickly. Their strength lies elsewhere. They preserve long memories. They ask old questions at moments when societies become intoxicated with novelty. And right now, amid discussions about scaling laws, inference costs, autonomous agents, and geopolitical competition, the Vatican has chosen to ask something unfashionable:
If machines increasingly resemble people, what remains uniquely human?
Questions like this tend to sound abstract until history catches up with them.
The word encyclical itself once referred to something mundane: a circular letter, a document meant to travel from one community to another. Over centuries it evolved into something more ambitious. Encyclicals became instruments for moments when institutions believed social order itself was shifting beneath people’s feet.
Industrial labor produced them.
Nuclear anxiety produced them.
Ecological collapse produced them.
Artificial intelligence now joins the list.
This is partly why papal encyclicals remain politically interesting even after the collapse of papal temporal power.
They no longer command armies.
They still compete to define the moral vocabulary.
Technology companies describe AI as acceleration. Governments describe it as competitiveness. Markets describe it as productivity. Far fewer voices ask whether societies organized around machine optimization eventually begin treating humans as inefficient components.
Magnifica Humanitas intervenes precisely there. The document repeatedly warns that the central danger is not merely intelligent machines, but the concentration of power around them: corporate concentration, algorithmic governance, informational asymmetry, and the erosion of human agency.
Beneath the arguments about regulation and dignity lie two deeper conflicts.
One concerns human subjectivity and posthumanism.
The other concerns computation and consciousness.
The first conflict feels more urgent.
The second remains uncertain.
The first is already happening.
For roughly two centuries, modern societies have treated limitation as a technical problem.
Industrialization corrected physical weakness.
Medicine corrected mortality.
Networks corrected distance.
Artificial intelligence increasingly promises to correct judgment itself.
Correction is not the problem.
The problem begins when optimization becomes anthropology—when people start treating human limitations as software defects.
Ancient societies were suspicious of this impulse long before machine learning.
The tragedy of Icarus was never flight itself. It was boundary refusal.
Prometheus was never merely a hero of innovation. He was also a warning that power can expand faster than moral capacity.
This is partly why contemporary technological culture sometimes feels mythological. Not because engineers believe in gods.
Because many genuinely believe finitude is optional.
Kant would have disliked this confidence.
Much of his philosophical project involved drawing borders around reason rather than expanding them indefinitely. Human beings, for Kant, are finite creatures. Maturity begins not with omniscience but with accepting cognitive limits.
Existentialists pushed this further.
Sartre and Camus were writing after catastrophe—war, occupation, ideological collapse. They did not encounter humanity at its strongest. They encountered it fractured.
Oddly, this made them more protective of human dignity, not less.
Freedom, in their work, is inseparable from incompleteness.
Responsibility exists precisely because certainty does not.
This is where I part ways with much contemporary transhumanism.
My disagreement is not technical.
It is aesthetic.
Transhumanist culture often assumes that more intelligence, more optimization, fewer emotional distortions, and greater predictability naturally represent progress.
I am not convinced.
Love frequently depends on misjudgment.
Moral life depends on hesitation.
Responsibility often means carrying costs that cannot be efficiently computed.
A perfectly optimized person might lose flaws.
They might also lose personhood.
Nietzsche would probably object to this argument.
Many Silicon Valley founders certainly would.
The language of the Übermensch appears frequently in technological circles, usually translated into upgrade pathways and enhancement strategies. I suspect this reading misses something essential. Nietzsche distrusted domestication more than weakness. His hostility was directed toward conformity, not embodiment itself.
Much contemporary techno-utopianism does not transcend humanity.
It standardizes humanity.
So I remain stubbornly on the side of subjectivity.
The most valuable parts of human life are often the least compressible ones: grief, ambiguity, irrational loyalty, sacrifice without optimization, attachment without guarantees.
Human greatness has never depended on being seamless.
It depends on carrying fractures without surrendering responsibility.
People like repeating the line that cracks are where the light gets in.
They forget something important.
Cracks also let storms in.
That cost is part of being human.
Yet this is not where the story ends.
Because I am much less certain when the discussion turns from subjectivity to consciousness.
I can defend human incompleteness.
I cannot confidently defend human exclusivity. I will discuss this part in a seperated article.
Magnifica Humanitas matters not because it opposes technology.
It matters because it asks whether societies undergoing acceleration can still practice restraint.
Industrial capitalism eventually taught humanity that factories did more than produce goods.
They produced social structures.
Artificial intelligence is doing something similar.
Algorithms produce attention.
Platforms produce relationships.
Models increasingly produce judgment.
Soon enough, they may begin producing subjects.
If human subjectivity disappears, the transition probably will not resemble science fiction.
It will feel easier than that.
Smoother.
More convenient.
And then, gradually, normal.
Reference
- https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
- https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937933/pope-ai-encyclical-tech-industry-reactions
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/29/pope-ai-encyclical