Silicon Valley has always had messianic dreams, dating back to the days when computers filled entire rooms.<\/p>\n
One of the oldest industry jokes has a programmer asking a computer, \u201cIs there a God?\u201d The computer answers: \u201cThere is now.\u201d The Whole Earth Catalog, a proto-hacker compendium of tools that deeply influenced Steve Jobs, proclaimed, \u201cWe are as gods and might as well get good at it.\u201d<\/p>\n
By investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, tech leaders are signaling that those early dreams have been fulfilled. Next stop, transcendence.<\/p>\n
Just as the new religion of A.I. seemed to be solidifying its control over mankind\u2019s destiny, however, a new voice is being heard on the other side of the world.<\/p>\n
Its message to the tech industry: Slow down. Elevate the human. Machines are not gods.<\/p>\n
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published with great ceremony on Monday his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas<\/a>, or \u201cMagnificent Humanity.\u201d The 42,300-word policy statement is respectful and named no names, but is at heart a sharp rebuke to Silicon Valley\u2019s assertions that it alone can be trusted to develop the future.<\/p>\n \u201cA.I. can be a valuable tool,\u201d the pope acknowledged, but the technology \u201ctends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.\u201d Without adequate oversight and transparency, he warned, \u201cthose who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n That would be bad news, he said: \u201cA more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.\u201d<\/p>\n The encyclical is expected to be at the center of the 70-year-old pontiff\u2019s reign in the same way that Rerum Novarum, which advocated for workers\u2019 rights and a fair wage, was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII\u2019s papacy at the end of the 19th century. Released while Silicon Valley slept, Magnifica Humanitas marked the latest effort to shape and possibly restrain the A.I. boom.<\/p>\n President Trump last week came close to signing a measure<\/a> that would have given the federal government the power to evaluate A.I. models before they were publicly released \u2014 then canceled the signing. The same day, California\u2019s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a measure<\/a> to study A.I.\u2019s impact on employment, an acknowledgment of the turmoil the companies insist is coming. Elon Musk, who has his own A.I. ambitions, tried to derail OpenAI, the leading A.I. company, with a lawsuit but was thwarted this month<\/a> on technical grounds.<\/p>\n Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a challenge to tech moguls like Mr. Musk, whose power and influence rival such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent asserted that the papacy was the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter could not be seen without the light cast by the former.<\/p>\n Love \u2019em or hate \u2019em, Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and their peers exert similar influence on our modern kings, which is to say politicians. The American economy is being propped up by spending on A.I. The technology is being deployed in offices and classrooms with dizzying speed and unknown effect.<\/p>\n The old religion challenging the new is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers.<\/p>\n Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history. Certainly nothing with the sweep and authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and instructing them to be cautious or even suspicious of A.I. \u2014 especially if the warning is regularly reinforced among the laity \u2014 could put a dent in tech\u2019s global ambitions.<\/p>\n \u201cHow much influence does the pope have in our secular Western world?\u201d asked Timothy Ahn, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the development of A.I. in religious institutions. \u201cWe\u2019re about to see. I doubt that tech executives in Palo Alto are going to be reading this encyclical.\u201d<\/p>\n In the best-case scenario, said Mr. Ahn, a former seminarian, the encyclical \u201cwill shape some moral deliberations.\u201d<\/p>\n Popes have traditionally worked with the long term in mind, and any evaluation of the encyclical\u2019s effect is years away. Those who know both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say any expectations of a head-on confrontation, much less a holy war, are misguided. A decade ago, Pope Francis began inviting tech luminaries in for an annual A.I. conference called the Minerva Dialogues.<\/p>\n In any case, if Leo confronted Silicon Valley outright, he would probably lose.<\/p>\n The fact that the Vatican unveiled the encyclical with Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the self-styled \u201cgood\u201d A.I. firm, pointed to the possibility that Leo is trying less to undermine A.I. than simply participate in the conversation around it. When Francis released his scathing encyclical about climate change in 2015, no oil company executives were invited to speak.<\/p>\n Luke Burgis, the founder of the Cluny Institute, which explores how faith and reason bear on technology and innovation, was optimistic that Leo\u2019s words would have an effect.<\/p>\n \u201cThis encyclical is a live wire that truly has the potential to change what is getting built in Silicon Valley,\u201d said Mr. Burgis, also a former seminarian. \u201cIt could help to give people a vocabulary to understand a new thing, in the same way that Rerum Novarum helped people understand the concept of a just wage.\u201d<\/p>\n But it won\u2019t happen automatically, or quickly, or easily.<\/p>\n \u201cThe church is only beginning its work here,\u201d Mr. Burgis said. \u201cIt needs to engage with a powerful counterforce that currently has it outnumbered, in both capital and compute.\u201d<\/p>\n New religion, old religion<\/p>\n Twenty years ago, even the idea of a confrontation between a pope and Silicon Valley was unthinkable. But in recent years, tech has moved deeper into matters that used to be exclusively religious in nature. There are widespread efforts to ward off death through various forms of lifestyle hacking. The Singularity \u2014 the rapturous moment when man and machine merge \u2014 is another hot topic.<\/p>\n Mr. Thiel, the tech investor, gives lectures about the Antichrist, which he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, set up a church in 2017 to \u201cpromote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence,\u201d<\/a> closed it and then opened it again in 2023.<\/p>\n Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, was ahead of his time. A.I. is now widely seen in tech and tech-sympathetic circles as quasi-divine.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are so ready to make A.G.I. their god,\u201d said<\/a> Garry Tan, who runs the start-up incubator Y Combinator, referring to artificial general intelligence, the next level of A.I. John Lennox, the retired Oxford mathematician who wrote \u201c2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity,\u201d said, \u201cThis race for A.I. super intelligence<\/a> is to make God and be God.\u201d Bill Gates<\/a>, contemplating the glorious future, said: \u201cYou can almost call it a new religion.\u201d<\/p>\n If A.I. is a new religion or God, that puts it in competition with the old religions and the old Gods. And Silicon Valley generally has one response to competition: Squash it.<\/p>\n Whatever ethical and humanist reasons Pope Leo has to protest A.I., he also needs to defend his market share, much the way Walmart had to defend itself against the upstart Amazon.<\/p>\n The tech world\u2019s initial reaction to the encyclical was muted on the holiday weekend. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, recirculated it to his millions of followers on X.<\/p>\n For all the noise over religion in Silicon Valley, Leo doesn\u2019t have many faithful there. A character on the satirical show \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d once joked that Christianity was \u201cborderline illegal\u201d in the tech community, although the reality is more complicated.<\/p>\n