AI Is Not Another Tower of Babel

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, reflects a growing global debate over artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society. Like many ongoing discussions about AI, the document expresses concern about concentrated technological power, economic disruption, and the risk of dehumanization. It also raises important questions about how societies should govern emerging technologies. But in focusing so heavily on the dangers of AI, the encyclical understates the degree to which these technologies can expand human capability, improve quality of life, and promote human flourishing, while largely overlooking the need for policies to support widespread AI adoption and diffusion.

One of the encyclical’s central metaphors is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Pope Leo warns that AI could become a modern expression of humanity’s pursuit of domination, uniformity, and self-sufficiency detached from moral responsibility. That concern about how societies govern powerful technologies is legitimate. But AI is not another Tower of Babel. It is a tool created by people to solve human problems. The key question is not whether AI itself represents hubris or moral failure, but whether societies use it responsibly and effectively.

The encyclical correctly recognizes that AI is a transformative technology reshaping economic and social life. But it often treats AI as uniquely dangerous, implying that it requires fundamentally new regulatory and moral frameworks. That risks overstating AI exceptionalism. Throughout history, societies have adapted to transformative technologies from the printing press to the Internet. AI is significant, but not categorically different in a way that automatically justifies exceptional restrictions or entirely new governance structures.

The encyclical also repeatedly associates technological power with “dominance,” particularly when discussing large private firms developing AI systems. This reflects a broader skepticism toward corporations and markets that runs throughout the document. Yet the Western AI ecosystem is not controlled by isolated actors operating outside democratic accountability. These tech firms operate within legal systems, respond to consumers, compete with rivals, and employ millions of people making ethical and practical decisions every day about how they build and deploy these technologies.

Moreover, private-sector leadership in innovation is hardly unprecedented. Many transformative technologies, including aviation, telecommunications, and computing, advanced through a combination of entrepreneurial initiative, research institutions, and public investment. Tech companies often benefit from scale, and concentration alone should not be treated as evidence of malign intent or inevitable social harm.

One of the encyclical’s most consequential claims is that AI cannot be considered morally neutral because technologies reflect the intentions and values of those who create and deploy them. This framing treats AI, and those building it, as morally suspect even though technologies do not possess independent moral agency. A hammer can be used to build a home or serve as a weapon. The same is true of AI.

The encyclical is right to warn against both “naïve enthusiasms” and “unfounded fears.” But despite that caution, the document often leans heavily toward dystopian concerns about job displacement, social control, inequality, and autonomous weapons while giving comparatively less attention to how AI can improve human welfare. Effective governance requires a more balanced approach focused on practical benefits, measurable harms, and institutional accountability.

The strongest response to concerns about AI is not to slow innovation broadly, but to accelerate beneficial deployment. More fundamentally, the encyclical represents a missed opportunity to grapple with the harder and ultimately more important question: how societies can successfully deploy AI to expand prosperity, improve public services, and strengthen human capability. Avoiding harm matters, but it is not sufficient. Building guardrails around AI does not automatically produce better health care, broader educational access, safer transportation systems, or higher living standards. Policymakers should also focus on the conditions that enable these outcomes, including investment, adoption, institutional modernization, infrastructure, and diffusion of technology throughout the economy. Focusing primarily on risk mitigation while giving less attention to deployment would be akin to concentrating food policy almost entirely on preventing contamination while paying too little attention to how to ensure nutritious food reaches hungry populations at scale.

The document acknowledges that AI can “heal, connect, educate and protect,” but these opportunities receive comparatively little attention. Yet AI is already helping expand access to knowledge and medical expertise, including through educational tools that assist people with limited formal schooling and health-care applications that improve diagnostic capabilities in underserved communities.

Importantly, the pursuit of AI advancement is not inherently opposed to broad social benefit. What matters is whether societies create the conditions for widespread adoption and diffusion. Policies that encourage competition, infrastructure investment, workforce adaptation, and broad access to digital tools are more likely to produce inclusive outcomes than policies centered primarily on restriction and precaution, even if they are well-intended.

Pope Leo is right to insist that technological progress should serve human dignity. But preserving human dignity does not require resisting technological change. In many cases, it requires embracing innovation that empowers people to live healthier, safer, more fulfilling, and more independent lives.

The central challenge for policymakers is not whether AI should advance, but whether societies will create the conditions for its benefits to be widely shared. AI should be viewed not as another Tower of Babel, but as one of the most powerful tools humanity has developed to improve human welfare—provided societies embrace the opportunity.