Whom AI Serves Matters More Than What It Can Do – Pope Leo XIV warns that AI systems concentrate power in few hands while extracting data globally without fair control or benefit.

Humans Are Not Raw Materials – Human dignity is inherent and cannot be overridden by commercial data extraction, especially from vulnerable communities.

Solidarity Over Rivalry -True AI progress requires shared governance, data ownership, and knowledge preservation—not just technological competition.

While governments debate regulation and corporations race toward the next breakthrough, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives.

It asks something more uncomfortable: not what artificial intelligence can do, but whom it will do it to.

Most people, if they are honest, have not thought seriously about that distinction. They experience AI as a convenience — a search that anticipates, a translation that arrives instantly, and a recommendation that somehow knows.

What they do not see, because it has been designed not to be seen, is the vast asymmetry underneath.

Someone built these systems. Someone owns them. Someone decided whose knowledge would train them and whose would not.

And those decisions, made quietly in boardrooms and research labs mostly concentrated in a handful of cities, are quietly shaping what the rest of the world will be allowed to know.

A pattern history repeats

There is a reason the phrase ‘AI colonialism’ makes people uneasy. It is not because the comparison is unfair. It is because it is uncomfortably accurate.

Colonial systems did not announce themselves as exploitative. They arrived with the language of progress, civilisation, and mutual benefit.

What they actually did was extract resources, labour, land, and knowledge from societies that lacked the power to refuse, while concentrating the returns elsewhere.

The affected communities were not absent from the system. They........

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