Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on the Custody of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence has the merit of removing AI from both naive enthusiasm and apocalyptic fear.
It takes it seriously for what it now is: not a mere tool, but a transformation of the way human beings produce language, organise information, delegate decisions, imagine themselves and construct power.

The decisive question is not whether to be for or against artificial intelligence. That is too poor a question. The question is another: what idea of man is being incorporated into the systems we are building?
Does technical progress remain at the service of the person or is it beginning to suggest that the person is now material to be optimised, classified, predicted, enhanced or replaced?

The biblical image of Babel, recalled by the Encyclical, is in this sense much more than a spiritual ornament. Babel is the grandiose, efficient, uniform, self-sufficient construction: one language, one technique, one direction.
But precisely this apparent unity becomes dispersion, because it erases the limit, the difference, the concrete face of the other.
In the face of AI, the risk is not only of building smarter machines, but of building a world in which the structure functions perfectly while man becomes less and less recognisable.

Here an old philosophical question returns. Modernity has taught us to recognise the autonomy of structures: language has its laws, the economy its dynamics, institutions their logic, technology its developments. In the 20th century, this intuition went as far as structuralism, as far as that ‘Kantianism without transcendental subject’ that Paul Ricoeur critically attributed to Lévi-Strauss and that Lévi-Strauss himself almost ended up accepting as the definition of his own enterprise: to think of impersonal structures of meaning, prior to and superior to individual consciousness.

Sartre reacted to this tendency by claiming the praxis, the history, the project, the concrete freedom of the subject. One can discuss many of his simplifications, but not the essential point: no structure can replace man as moral subject. Meaning is not only what happens within a system; it is also what an existence assumes, risks, chooses, transforms.

On a different level, Noam Chomsky also offered a useful lesson. His critique of structural linguistics and behaviourism stemmed from his conviction that human language was not reducible to a repertoire of habits or regularities observable from the outside. Language is structure, certainly; but it is also creativity, the generative faculty, the ability to produce sentences never said before, new meanings, new responses to new situations. Man is not merely the passing point of an impersonal code: he is the living being capable of inaugurating meaning.

This insight becomes decisive today. The algorithm is structure, but an operational, predictive, productive structure. It does not merely describe the world: it organises it, filters it, makes it visible or invisible, decides which contents circulate, which profiles deserve credit, which workers are efficient, which words are amplified. It is an invisible grammar of power. This is precisely why its functional autonomy cannot be mistaken for moral self-sufficiency.

This reflection does not only belong to the Christian tradition. It also belongs to the best liberal tradition. Liberalism, when it is not reduced to idolatry of the market, stems from the defence of the person against any power that claims to possess him entirely: the state, the mob, ideology, conformity, economic monopoly, the bureaucratic machine. From Locke to Benjamin Constant, from Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, to the tradition of the open society and pluralism, the heart of liberalism is not selfish individualism, but the limitation of power in the name of the concrete freedom of the person.

In the face of AI, this lesson becomes very topical: no power must become total.
Not the state, not the market, not the platform, not the algorithm. Liberal freedom does not coincide with the right of the strongest to innovate without limits; it coincides with the construction of institutional, legal and cultural conditions so that the individual is not crushed by opaque powers. Today, the new opaque power may be precisely that of the digital structure: not a visible sovereign, but a network of systems that profile, predict and condition.

This is why the Encyclical can also speak to secular, liberal, reformist thinking. The person cannot be reduced to a function. Man is not just calculation, performance, data, efficiency, information. Nor is he merely a biological species to be empowered. He is a concrete individual and a community relationship; a fragile body and freedom; memory, speech, responsibility, desire for the good.

Here we return toHomo signans, the man who produces signs and lives in signs, but who can never be reduced to the signs he produces. From cave paintings to Greek philosophy, from writing to cathedrals, from books to the digital network, mankind has always externalised memory, thought and imagination. Artificial intelligence is a powerful stage in this history. But precisely because speech can be imitated by the machine, it becomes more urgent to defend what the machine does not possess: the body, the face, consciousness, pain, forgiveness.

Artificial intelligence is, after all, a logos without pathos. It can produce discourse on pain, but not suffering. It can simulate empathy, but not hurt. It can imitate prayer, but not tremble before mystery. It can recombine religious, philosophical, affective words, but not know conversion, guilt, expectation, hope, abandonment. It is language without flesh, form without exposition, sign without wound.

In the human this does not and cannot happen. The human word is always born inside an exposed body: to joy, fear, death, love, shame, promise. Even when it lies or stiffens into ideology, it remains traversed by an original pathos, because it belongs to a living being that can suffer, love, lose, wait, die.

Here the Encyclical’s reflection touches its deepest point. A secular culture can and must defend dignity, freedom, limits, pluralism, the rejection of all total power. But perhaps only the Christian faith dares to say to the end that the Logos does not remain an idea, structure, information, calculation or abstract principle: the Logos became flesh. He did not simply speak of the human; he took on the pathos of the human. It has known birth, hunger, friendship, fear, tears, injustice, torture, death. That is why, in the face of AI, Christianity does not just defend a religious doctrine: it defends the impossibility of definitively separating sense from flesh, speech from vulnerability, intelligence from compassion.

The problem with transhumanism arises exactly here. Not in the desire, legitimate and rightful, to cure disease, alleviate pain, prolong life, restore possibilities to wounded bodies. All this is human. Medicine, science and technology are high forms of human collaboration in the care of creation.
Paradoxically, it is precisely the Judeo-Christian hope in the resurrection of bodies that has been able to nurture a profound trust in the dignity of matter, in the care of the body, in the fight against physical evil.

But this hope reverses into its opposite when it becomes an oligarchic dream of the fabrication of the new man. If the design of the empowered human remains the privilege of the few for a long time, all the lives that will be born before, during or outside that design will risk being considered implicitly inferior. The poor, the sick, the disabled, the old, the frail, the unenhanced will become no longer persons to be cherished, but backward versions of the human.

It is against this temptation that a common ethics of the limit must be recovered. An ethics of the limit does not mean resignation. It means fighting disease, suffering, injustice and death without turning man into an object of manufacture. It means healing without selecting, empowering without discarding, innovating without despising those who remain fragile.

The great Christian tradition meets here an ancient secular demand, from Socrates onwards: the purpose of associated life is not the power of the city, it is not the success of technology, it is not the victory of the best performer, but the good of man, both a unique individual and a community being.

Medieval scholastic nominalism can also help us understand this. The universal does not erase the singular. Individuals are not negligible remnants of the idea, nor statistical accidents of a general pattern. They are creatures willed by God in their unrepeatability. Translated into civilised language: no structure, no system, no algorithm, no planning of the human can have the right to consider some lives less worthy because they are less efficient, less healthy, less productive, less upgradeable.

Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical does not ask to stop research, nor does it ask to demonise technology. It asks for something more difficult: to govern it according to a high idea of man. The great political question of the coming decades will be this: who decides what is human? The states? The technological markets? The scientific elites? The platforms? Or a democratic community capable of putting the good of the concrete person back at the centre?

If we are to avoid yet another Babel, regulations, although necessary, will not suffice. We will need a new alliance between humanistic culture, science, politics, religions, schools, law, economics and civil society. What will be needed is a way of thinking capable of loving technology without idolising it; of accepting limits without ceasing to fight evil; of defending the individual without forgetting the community. No progress deserves this name if, in advancing, it leaves man behind.