NOTICE News: “Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical Monday — an 83-page document titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) — and it reads less like a church document and more like a progressive policy agenda for the digital age. The pope called on governments to regulate AI, warned that companies invoking ethics “in the abstract” isn’t enough, and said every introduction of automation should come with “verifiable measures to protect employment” for workers displaced by it. He went further on wealth: global prosperity is “increasingly concentrated” in fewer hands, and the “invisible hand” of the market can no longer be trusted to fix it. Oh, and he issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s own role in legitimizing the trans-Atlantic slave trade — connecting centuries of colonial exploitation directly to the new forms of digital labor and extraction AI is fueling today. The encyclical was presented alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. Yes, that Anthropic.”

• See also the Video of the Pope’s presentation.
• The New York Times: “Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.”