By KIM BELLARD

Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t heard of the phrase “meat computer.”  Apparently this has been around for some time, and, as Lora Kelley discusses in The New York Times, the tech elites are increasingly using it, either as a way to humanize AI or as a way to disparage what humans can do relative to AI (e.g., Elon Musk posted last summer, “We are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.”).  

Raphaël Millière, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, told Ms. Kelley that the metaphor aims to“move the public perception on how humanlike and intelligent frontier models are.”

Well, Pope Leo isn’t buying it.

On Monday he issued his first encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It’s some 200 pages long, so forgive me if I’m having to rely on summaries, but he raises issues that I hope our politicians and business leaders will pay appropriate attention to.

Encyclicals are, it appears, one of the highest forms of teaching that a pope can give, and it is rare for a pope to deliver one himself, so this is something he takes very seriously. As he should.

AI, he asserts, is the new industrial revolution, and he calls for us to “disarm” it: “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. Disarming does not mean renouncing technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”

“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he said. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”

The pope makes it clear that he is not against technology per se – “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity” – but the question is how it is used and what the impact on people will be. “For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible,” he said.

He is particularly concerned about control over AI, and the wealth that comes from it, should not be concentrated among an elite few: