✨✝ The AI Pope

Leo XIV's name choice hints at a Vatican "third way" for the AI revolution, echoing Leo XIII's moral framework for the Industrial Age

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

I’m a Christian but not Roman Catholic (I was able to win on Jeopardy! in the early 2000s despite an embarrassing clunker of an answer that most Catholic school kids would have aced). Nor am I an observer of Vatican politics.

But I was recently re-reading (skimming, really) A History of Christianity by British historian Paul Johnson. With that book top of mind, I quickly zoomed to its section on Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903) upon hearing that the new American pope, Chicago native and White Sox fan Robert Prevost, had taken the papal name of Leo XIV.

In his brief survey of Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci’s lengthy reign, Johnson mostly focused on his encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891, which addressed the social and economic challenges of the Industrial Revolution. The document offered a triangulation between unfettered capitalism and ascendant socialism. Although the pontiff unsparingly diagnosed the industrial era's ills — including exploitative working conditions and growing class antagonism — the pontiff’s prescription rejected both laissez-faire economics and socialist collectivism. Instead, as Johnson notes, Leo charted a third way by affirming private property rights while insisting they carry social obligations. Johnson:

Leo XIII accepted authorized trades unions and arbitration boards to fix wages, but lamented the disappearance of the old medieval guilds. Both socialism and usury were wrong; private property was essential to freedom and the ‘classless society’ was against human nature. Workers should never resort to violence. Employers should adopt a paternal attitude to their labourers, pay them a just wage, guard them from occasions of sin, and use any wealth ‘left over from maintaining their standing’ to promote ‘the perfection of their own natures’ and act as stewards ‘of God’s providence for the benefit of others’.

(As an aside, it’s interesting, although perhaps irrelevant, to point out that Italy and the United States started the Industrial Revolution with similar living standards, but by the time of the Rerum novarum, US per capita GDP was 125 percent higher.)

A bit of speculation: The nod to Leo XIII could be telling. Maybe Prevost sees parallels between the Industrial Revolution and today's emerging AI Revolution. If so, his choice of papal name could signal intention to confront our era's analogous technological disruption. While observers widely expect Prevost to maintain Francis's social justice emphasis, few have explored the socio-technological implications of his throwback nomenclature. That, even though the Vatican has already shown considerable interest in the issue. Like his late-19th-century predecessor, Leo XIV would perhaps chart a moral “third way” in the Age of AI.

What might that look like? Even more speculation: