I wish Pope Leo XIV had more faith in markets and less in government. I write of the pope’s AI encyclical in my latest column:

Instead of recognizing that AI will likely increase the working poor’s earnings, he seems more concerned about how policymakers can counter AI-driven inequality, and how private corporations will use these tools to grab market share. Leo calls for “measures to ensure equity,” including “industrial policies,” with apparent confidence that they will reduce the concentration of wealth and power, when they are more likely to have the opposite effect.

I also wish Leo had spent more time on AI’s enormous potential to improve human welfare.

The Pope focuses on how AI could undermine human flourishing, whether by ushering in autonomous warfare, exacerbating inequality, violating privacy, causing mass unemployment, or reducing human beings to cogs. We may even gradually lose “the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

But:

These tools could accelerate pharmaceutical innovation, enhance the quality and accessibility of health care and education (particularly in the developing world), create jobs, and raise living standards. Indeed, I expect that, on balance, AI will substantially increase human flourishing.

Ultimately, though, these disagreements are less important than the moral and intellectual foundations of Leo’s first encyclical:

In a world captivated by technological advances, the Pope emphasizes the primacy of each person’s inherent and inestimable dignity. And amid the frenzy around picking AI winners and the hype about AI possibly eclipsing humanity, Leo asks us to protect the common good and challenges us to embrace our weakness and frailty. As he puts it, “we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”

In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo seeks to shift attention away from the marvels and terrors of AI and toward the magnificence of humanity. With all eyes now on the technology, this message is needed and welcome. AI tools are impressive. But they are pedestrian compared to the grandeur of a human being.

In the column, I also argue that the Holy Father is right that AI is not conscious and that he is right to argue that AI “cognition” is very different than human cognition.