'Nature' op-ed: Pope Leo’s encyclical ‘deserves serious attention from the scientific community’

In an op-ed in the online science journal Nature, an advisor to the Vatican on artificial intelligence (AI) encouraged scientists to heed the insights of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical because the religious document addresses issues of AI to a degree that secular institutions have yet to grapple with. 

Father Paolo Benanti, a Third Order Regular of the Franciscans, wrote in the op-ed that Magnifica humanitas “is a diagnosis of who governs AI and on whose behalf” and outlines “the unprecedented ways in which AI is concentrating power.” According to Vatican News, Father Benanti is also the chair of the Italian government’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence for Information and former member of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Advisory Body on AI. His remarks in the op-ed offer a prominent message to the science community, as Nature has a monthly readership of about nine million people. 

In the encyclical, Father Benanti notes, the Pontiff expresses concern over how a few private actors are currently in charge of decision-making for AI databases used by billions of people without national regulation safeguards. In addition, the encyclical addresses AI’s impact on jobs, autonomous weapons, and risks to democratic discourse. 

Further, the encyclical draws attention to the dangers of allowing algorithms to make decisions that people historically made, Father Benanti added. For example, he wrote, some jurisdictions are leaning on predictive algorithms for sentencing and policing strategies.

“Magnifica humanitas deserves serious attention from the scientific community,” he wrote. “This is not because the Pope has legal or regulatory authority over AI development — he doesn’t — but because the document flags a structural problem that continues to be understated.”

He then argued that “the capacity to shape how AI systems reason, what they optimize for and whose values they embed is a political issue.” 

He criticized the approach, prevalent in the U.S., of leaving AI up to self-regulation based on personal ethical standards, as “more an abdication of responsibility than governance” and added that a number of scientists who uphold a purported neutrality are complicit. 

Arguing that scientists should pay close attention to the encyclical, Father Benanti wrote, "When the Catholic Church invests the full apparatus of its teaching authority in a social question, it is often because secular institutions — universities, parliaments, scientific academies — have been unable or unwilling to address a crack in the foundations of human coexistence.”

As examples, he cited 20th-century encyclicals that responded to Nazism, Stalinism, facism, and totalitarianism. 

“Magnifica humanitas,” he wrote, “is ringing the same civilizational alarm bell.”