The identify selection of a brand new pope carries symbolism for the values he needs to emulate, in recognition of essentially the most urgent points he sees as chief of the Catholic Church.
For Pope Leo XIV, artificial intelligence is on the coronary heart of his identify selection.
Born Robert Francis Prevost, the brand new pope selected his papal identify in reference to Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) who presided over the Catholic Church throughout the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in large social upheaval. Pope Leo XIV sees the AI increase as the same second of speedy societal change.
In his address to the Faculty of Cardinals on Saturday, Leo XIV defined his identify selection, explicitly mentioning the parallels of those two cataclysmic eras:
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Sensing myself referred to as to proceed on this identical path, I selected to take the identify Leo XIV. There are completely different causes for this, however primarily as a result of Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social query within the context of the primary nice industrial revolution. In our personal day, the Church provides to everybody the treasury of her social instructing in response to a different industrial revolution and to developments within the subject of synthetic intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
Pope Leo XIII was identified for specializing in social inequality and labor rights throughout the industrialization interval as employees moved away from particular person craftsmanship and farm work and into mass manufacturing factories underneath harsh, low-wage situations. But he additionally emphasised particular person human rights and rejected socialism. In his encyclical, or formal letter to the Catholic Church, Leo XIII referred to as for a steadiness between “the duties and rights of capital and labor,” which can be the subtitle of his Rerum Novarum tackle.
For Leo XIV to observe within the footsteps of the earlier social reformer is a strong message to the AI business and its influence on the worldwide workforce.
Fashionable society has already seen the consequences of AI by way of job alternative and the exploitation of data labelers. In line with the World Financial Discussion board’s 2025 jobs report, 41 p.c of employers intend to downsize their workforce in favor of automating duties with AI. And the Worldwide Labor Group printed a 2024 report highlighting the “invisible labor” of AI growth and the low-wages and the restricted protections of those employees.
The Catholic Church has already weighed in on different penalties of AI. Pope Francis, Leo’s predecessor, published a message in January 2024, warning about AI as a “distortion of actuality by partially or fully false narratives, believed and broadcast as in the event that they had been true.” Extra just lately, Pope Francis’ remaining tackle earlier than he died mirrored on technology replacing human interaction.
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