The new Pope picked his name for ‘the defense of human dignity’ amidst the AI revolution

Wake up babe: new Pope just dropped. Pope Leo XIV was elected on May 8 following the death of Pope Francis, becoming the first-ever American Pontiff, and on Saturday gave his first address to the College of Cardinals, where he revealed his choice of name was driven by concerns about our age’s technological revolutions and AI specifically (thanks, Ars Technica).

The Pope’s name is Robert Prevost, but as is tradition he got to choose a special papal name, and it turns out “Leo” is a callback to the Pope that led the church during the industrial revolution, as well as a nod to Pope Francis’s concerns about where technology is going.

“Sensing myself called to continue in this same path [as Pope Francis], I chose to take the name Leo XIV,” said the Pope. “There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”

This encyclical’s title translates as “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor” and is subtitled “On the conditions of labour.” It was issued by Pope Leo XIII in May 1891 to all Catholic worthies, and is something of a broadside aimed at unrestricted capitalism and how its operation must be tempered by moral considerations: it’s particularly noted for its depiction of the condition of the working classes.

Getting back to our own age, Pope Leo XIV went on to tell the Cardinals that AI is “another industrial revolution” and presumably requires the same kind of Papal redress. Pope Francis first warned us about AI in August 2023 in his World Day of Peace address, and earlier this year returned to the theme in the essay Antiqua et Nova (“old and new”).

“As in all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here,” said Francis. “Where human freedom allows for the possibility of choosing what is wrong, the moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used.”

Pope Leo XIV believes that, much as the industrial revolution upended traditional ways of living and working, AI is going to do the same, and not necessarily for the better.

“In our own day,” said the Pope, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

Well, seeing the new Pope take up against AI is an odd one. Leo XIV is presumably going to be leading the Catholic church for decades to come (when he’s not playing Wordle) and who knows what developments we’ll see from the AI sector in that time. But I, for one, am very much looking forward to Sam Altman being subtly dissed in Latin.