How Many GPUs Does the Pope Have?

Pope Leo XIV chose his regnal name as a thesis. On Monday, he released  Magnifica Humanitas , the first papal encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence. He signed the document on the 135th anniversary of  Rerum Novarum , the 1891 letter in which his namesake, Leo XIII, addressed industrialization. The parallel is the argument. The first American pope, drawn from the country most identified with the AI buildout, has staked his pontificate on the proposition that we are living through an economic transition analogous to Leo XIII’s. But this one cuts even closer to the meaning of the human person. AI, Leo writes, is a “change of epoch.” His warning is not primarily about jobs or bias or autonomous weapons, though he addresses each. The deeper risk he names is that concentrated private control of the technology will reduce “the mystery of the person” to “data and performance.” AI springs from humanity, but is not human. It is not embodied, has no experiences, knows neither joy nor pain. Leo reframes the AI debate as a question about what is essentially human, naming a life of “openness and communion” rather than optimization as the standard against which the technology must be measured. For the firms now racing to build superintelligence, and for the companies and governments that will deploy it, that standard is a direct ethical and moral challenge. On labor, the encyclical is more specific than the early coverage suggests. Leo names what he calls “new forms of slavery” in the digital economy, pointing to young data labelers and content moderators paid minimally to train and police the systems, and to younger workers extracting rare earth materials under dangerous conditions. Their bodies, he writes, are “scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly.” He demands that every introduction of automation be paired with verifiable measures to protect employment and secure worker participation in decisions about deployment. He reaffirms the role of unions, professional associations, and intermediary institutions as the structures through which workers exercise voice.  Silicon Valley, like much of economics and society more generally, treats competition as the engine of progress and the default condition of humanity. Leo names something the historical record shows came first: the human capacity for cooperation and mutual obligation. The surgeon Paul Brand recounted a Margaret Mead lecture in which she identified a healed femur as the earliest sign of civilization, evidence that someone had cared for an injured person long enough for the bone to mend rather than abandoning the injured to certain death. Reciprocal obligation predates the wheel and likely made it possible. This is the territory where AI is weakest and where workers will be most valuable. Judgment under uncertainty, ethical reasoning, the social relationships that hold teams and communities together, and responsibility for outcomes are not residuals. They are what economy and polity actually run on. The empirical work on AI complementarity points the same direction Leo articulates this in theological language: The work that resists automation requires weighing competing goods, taking responsibility for outcomes a model cannot own, and bringing tacit knowledge to situations the training data did not anticipate. Strip those capacities out of education, workforce policy and day-to-day business operations and the result would be a leaner economy but also a more fragile one, populated by workers who can operate the tools but cannot judge when the tools are wrong. Rerum Novarum  took decades to be absorbed into law, institutions, and labor practice. It informed the Catholic labor tradition that shaped much of 20th-century industrial relations and fed into later encyclicals like  Quadragesimo Anno ,  Laborem Exercens  and  Centesimus Annus .  Magnifica Humanitas  is likely to take as long because the technology it addresses is qualitatively different and more expansive than the ones Leo XIII and other popes have faced. The question for policymakers, employers, and educators is not whether to engage the encyclical but whether to engage it before the AI labor market is built around its opposite premise.  The post How Many GPUs Does the Pope Have? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .