The first American pope has emerged as one of the most lucid critics of Silicon Valley in the artificial intelligence era.
Pope Leo XIV has warned of “the extremely rich people who are investing in artificial intelligence, totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity”.
He has repeatedly called for AI development to prioritise serving humans rather than replacing or diminishing human dignity.
In a social media post on X last year, he wrote: “Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity.
“The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work — to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”
The response to the head of the Catholic Church (which has about 1.4 billion religious followers) from some powerful corners of Silicon Valley has been mockery. Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist (X followers: 2 million) who argued in The Techno-Optimist Manifesto that “any deceleration of AI will cost lives”, responded to the pontiff’s statement on social media with a viral meme depicting a GQ interviewer raising her eyebrows as she asks the actress Sydney Sweeney about her controversial American Eagle jeans advertisement.
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The investor, whose firm has backed AI companies including OpenAI and Mistral AI, later deleted the post following a public backlash.
Peter Thiel, another billionaire venture capitalist, who is a self-described Christian and has warned of the perils of slowing down technological advancement, also appears to be rattled by the pope.
Speaking at an invitation-only lecture at the University of Cambridge last month, he speculated about candidates for the antichrist, warning of the danger of the pope becoming aligned with a “woke” or anti-progress US president such as the left-wing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to The Spectator, which attended the event.
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Theologians are worried about grandiose visions emanating from Silicon Valley that suggest AI will solve all of our problems.
The importance of recognising AI’s limitations, such as its inability to replicate human relationships, was a theme of discussion at a panel I was invited to speak on last week at Reuben College, Oxford, on the topic of “God and Silicon Valley: The Place of Religion in the Development of Artificial Intelligence”.
Questions posed by academics during the event included: “Should we anthropomorphise the machine? Will faith in tech replace faith in God?”
The panel had been inspired by a column I wrote last year on the rise of Christianity in Silicon Valley, as advances in artificial intelligence raise questions for tech workers, such as: “What does it mean to be human, if we can be gods? Should we be gods?”
Those concerns do not appear to be front of mind for the leaders of AI companies, who are embracing the Trump administration’s green light to develop superhuman AI without guardrails, in a policy environment framed by the technological arms race between the US and China.
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has compared the need to build AI data centres to having to choose between curing cancer and improving public education. In a blog post last year, he said: “If we are limited by compute, we’ll have to choose which one [curing cancer or improving public education] to prioritise; no one wants to make that choice, so let’s go build.”
However, there is still plenty of uncertainty about how long it will take to develop human-like intelligence, and whether the technology will be prioritised for improving healthcare and public education over commercial interests.
AI already poses immediate dangers. In January, the pope warned that AI tools could lead humans to renounce their ability to think, while substituting relationships with others for AI systems risks damaging the social, cultural and political fabric of society.
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Meanwhile, he noted that only a handful of companies are leading this “enormous invisible force” that affects us all.
“This gives rise to significant concerns about the oligopolistic control of algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence, which are capable of subtly influencing behaviour and even rewriting human history — including the history of the Church — often without us really realising it,” he said.
Such warnings from the Vatican have so far failed to have any impact on the activities of tech leaders in America. It will take more than the holy father to bring the gods of Silicon Valley back down to earth.
