Pope Leo XIV’s choice of papal name is profoundly significant. The last pope with that name, Leo XIII, is generally regarded as the founder of modern Catholic social teaching. In his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum (literally “of new things”), Pope Leo XIII addressed the manifold injustices and inequities of the Industrial Revolution, applying timeless gospel principles to the “new things” that characterized the industrial age.
When Rerum novarum was written, the world was embarking on the Second Industrial Revolution—marked chiefly by electricity, industrial chemicals, and the internal combustion engine. It was through this revolution that the world we know was born. If we could travel back in time, the year 1870 would appear alien and primitive to us. But the year 1920 would look fairly modern. The difference can be accounted for by the technological advances of the second industrial revolution. Before 1870, the world was Malthusian—any increase in living standards brought about by technological progress would be canceled out by an increase in population. After 1870, we can see a sustained rise in living standards.
But this progress was not fairly shared. The period was known as the Gilded Age for a reason: it was characterized by a sharp chasm between rich and poor, capital and labor, the powerful and the powerless. Workers at the time toiled for long hours in dangerous conditions for paltry wages, with no safety net to cushion them in the event of unemployment, disability, or old age. Unsurprisingly, it was a time of great discontent. In Europe, socialist parties were attracting increasing numbers of workers. By 1912, the German Social Democratic Party—a party with distinct Marxist leanings—became the largest party in the German parliament. Socialism held less appeal in the United States, but labor disputes were especially contentious and brutal. A year after Rerum novarum was written, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie brought in a private militia to violently suppress a strike in his largest steel mill.
Grave injustices like these prompted Pope Leo XIII to write his most famous encyclical. While rejecting socialism, he nonetheless called for workers to be granted a just wage in accord with their dignity, for unions to be able to bargain collectively with employers, and for the state to prioritize workers and the poor. This set the stage for the development of modern Catholic social teaching. The Church showed that it was willing to enter the great economic debates—and to take sides. When the new pope chose the name Leo XIV, it seemed clear that he would once again address the “new things” of our own era, which Leo XIII could not have anticipated. Chief among these are climate change and artificial intelligence (AI).
Climate change was a major priority of Pope Francis. Our modern industrial economy, and the attendant dramatic rise in living standards, was built by burning fossil fuels. But we now know that this is causing dangerous changes in the climate, which—if left unchecked—will lead to an equally dramatic fall in living standards, especially among the world’s poorest people. It was for this reason that Pope Francis urged vigorous climate action to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and hailed the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which was signed by 195 countries.
But AI has developed so rapidly that Pope Francis was not able to fully grapple with its moral implications. That task now falls to Pope Leo XIV. And indeed, he has expressed his intention to do precisely that. In explaining why he chose the name Leo, he said that it was
mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, 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.
It is still unclear precisely how AI will affect the economy, workers, and social relations. Optimists predict an enormous burst in productivity, which will lift living standards to a much higher plane. But the boosters tend to gloss over the many risks. AI could replace more and more jobs, leading to widespread unemployment and underemployment. Until now, technological advances have come mainly at the expense of blue-collar workers—who are forced into lower-paying and more precarious jobs in the service sector as industrial robots replace them on manufacturing assembly lines. But AI could doom the jobs of countless white-collar workers, too, especially at the lower end of the scale. AI could also dramatically increase inequality, as a chasm emerges between the owners of capital and technology platforms and increasingly disenfranchised workers. And given that AI requires vast amounts of energy to operate, it could exacerbate the climate crisis.
Then there are the social effects. AI could also increase misinformation, as well as malicious and divisive content, making political polarization and animosity even worse. In this respect, it could even threaten democracy. AI could lead to a loss of privacy as surveillance encompasses all areas of our lives. The rise of sinister-sounding “AI companions” could crowd out human relationships, contributing further to loneliness and alienation. And then there is the greatest risk of all—that AI will eventually destroy human civilization. This may sound like a science-fiction scenario, but AI creators assign a chillingly high probability to something like this happening.
In short, AI could go in one of two directions—dystopian or utopian. In the dystopian future, a huge number of jobs would be lost and those lucky enough to have a job would face lower wages. Inequality would skyrocket. AI would be powered by the burning of fossil fuels on a massive scale, leading to climate catastrophe. There would be a discontented underclass fed a toxic diet of pornography, marijuana, online gambling, video games, cryptocurrency, and far-right politics. Demagogues would exploit this discontent, undermining—or even destroying—democracy.
The utopian future, by contrast, would require a conscious effort to share the benefits of the AI boom broadly across the population—both by empowering unions and taxing the owners of capital to fund universal social benefits. Inequality would be kept in check. The future envisaged by John Maynard Keynes back in 1930, in which people would need to work only fifteen hours a week, might finally come to pass. Freed from economic anxiety and precarity, people would be free to engage in the kinds of cultural and educational endeavors that contribute to human flourishing. In such a scenario, AI would be powered by cheap renewable energy, allowing for a world of abundance that does not harm the climate.
Whether we land on the dystopian or utopian trajectory does not depend on technology. It depends on political choices, which in turn depend on moral choices. This is where Catholic social teaching comes in, with its emphasis on human dignity, the common good, solidarity, distributive justice, and the priority of labor over capital. Most importantly, the principle of the universal destination of goods affirms that the goods of the earth and human labor should benefit all people—not just the rich or the owners of capital. This is certainly true for the fruits of AI. Just as Rerum novarum did in the 1890s, a new encyclical could call on society to make the right moral choices about the “new things” we face in 2020s. We have good reason to expect that this is exactly what Pope Leo XIV has in mind.
