Magnifica Humanitas: hope in the age of AI

Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, "Magnificent Humanity," brings ancient understandings of human needs and possibilities to bear on our commitments to ultra-modern digital technologies. Avoiding both technophobic pessimism and blinkered optimism about AI technologies, the encyclical points rather to hope, a potent political alternative to the often-dismal imperatives of Realpolitik.

In an age of AI, optimism and pessimism about risks and opportunities swing on the numbers - the speed, the size and the trajectory - all dropped into an equation and multiplied by a speculative constant. Perhaps those calculations are required of us, but they typically constrain us within already-in-the-premises outcomes.

Hope - the proposal of the encyclical - is something else altogether. Hope does not calculate; it posits an alternative vision, despite any calculation or reading of the signs of the times. There are no numbers in the encyclical, no extrapolations of graphs - a distinct lack of "evidence". Hope does not observe and extrapolate and then smile or frown. This surprising indifference to the current state of play reflects that the encyclical's main concern is not a matter of quantity but of quality - our continuing capacity to hurt each other, despite thousands of years of moral teaching from many sources.

Optimism and pessimism are matters of quantity. The encyclical is not optimistic, in that it cannot point to any growth in our moral capacity. But neither does the letter see a downward spiral, to make it pessimistic. Hope, rather, posits and then acts according to that vision.

In his final chapter, Leo shifts from broadly sociological, economic, and political categories to a more specifically theological account of our common life. This, with its references to the doctrine of the Incarnation, eucharistic practice, and Mary's Magnificat, will seem to many readers to be irrelevant in the face of the hard social and political choices we might have to make. But the disjunction between the social and the political of the first four chapters and the theology of the final chapter reflects the difference between the optimism-pessimism spectrum and hope.

Leo's hope is [in] the grandeur of the human, signalled in the Incarnation, rehearsed in the Eucharist, witnessed to in every word and action founded upon and pointing to a wider vision. Mary's Magnificatis pertinent here. This ancient song is sung against the prevailing order, looking forward to a future in which God has cast down the mighty, filled the hungry and lifted the lowly. The realism of optimism and pessimism gets no look-in. Mary's song simply contradicts observed reality with a different set of values and invites us to wonder: what difference would it make now if that were the future towards which we are headed? How would we act?

This is hope: a vision of an alternative social and political reality beyond what the numbers predict, coupled to a call to live as if that vision were our present reality. The reactionary necessities of big tech and political action in the service of Realpolitik are displaced by a vision of the human which would lead us to act in contradiction to the dehumanising temptations of the present.

The political poverty of the encyclical is its apparent lack of realism about what is likely to happen next and what, on the probabilities, we should do about it. But this is also its strength, presenting a set of values profoundly different from those which currently prevail.

Hope is not alien here. Everything we do implies or proposes a hope, including the visions and options against which the Pope warns. The question is only what the hope - the vision - is which drives us. A suspicion in the encyclical is that realising our prevailing hopes will mean that we will deny much which matters about being human on the way to becoming "better".

This is suggested or evident in the technocratic paradigm the Pope describes, the apparent commercial and political indifference to the social cost of major shifts in the workscape, and the convenience of AI-powered military engagements, among other things. The hope implicit in such developments might be of a better future, but it is not clearly a future in which we will all have a life-giving share and is potentially one for which many of us will pay too high a price.

The issue is not new; the potential and threat of AI is just another form of an enduring question: will we order our common life for the benefit of all or just some? The encyclical presses past the next thing we might do - whether good or bad - and asks about the vision toward which we are working or, probably better, the end from which we take our bearings.

The hope Leo holds out is not a wish but a vision of a shared, mutually responsible humanity. And this is a humanity not merely to come; the vision is posed to shape our social intent and political action here and now. And so the encyclical seeks commitments to truth, education, transparency, subsidiarity and trust, not merely as reactions to the rise of AI but as anticipations of that vision of a shared and vital human future.

The means reveal the end we hope will be ours. Leo's call is that what we do next already reflects the grandeur and magnificence not only of humanity in some abstract, utopian future, but the humanity of each of one of us, here and now: hope lived today.