The quest for machine superintelligence is not merely a gold rush, motivated by money. In the minds of many of its leaders, the arrival of a new form of cognition has a tingling, existential feel because of the danger and disruption it promises. Billions of years of evolution have produced something that we take to be special: human intelligence. But now we have arrived at a perilous moment—the birth of what amounts to a new species, one that outsmarts humans. AI “raises profound questions for us,” the Google executive James Manyika said in an interview. “Who are we? What do we value? What are we good at? How do we relate with each other?” The AI pioneer Demis Hassabis believes that AI will be “the most important invention that humanity will ever make.”

Contemplating a technology with almost infinite potential, experts fail to agree even on the basics of what it means for humankind. The leaders of the AI lab Anthropic give better-than-even odds that, by the end of 2028, they will be able to prompt their system to make a smarter version of itself—and that it will do so without any further instruction. The chief executives of other major tech companies speak of systems that will outperform humans on all cognitive assignments; they imagine futuristic companies with almost no human employees and predict cataclysmic job losses. Others are more skeptical. The economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu suggests that AI will disrupt only a fraction of human tasks and that productivity will therefore change marginally. The computer scientist Yann LeCun stresses the limits of the current AI paradigm, charging that the billions of dollars of investment chasing superintelligence represent the triumph of “complete BS.”

On the question of whether AI systems threaten humans and not just their livelihoods, the polarization is equally dizzying. In a 2023 essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen insisted that “AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. . . . [AI] is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.” But at AI labs such as Anthropic, many researchers fear that AI will develop a survival instinct and compete aggressively. Some put their “p(doom)”—the probability that superintelligence will result in human annihilation—at 50 percent, but there are extreme doomers who go even higher. Last year, two prominent maximalists published a book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Faced with such bewildering divergences and contemplating a technology that seems unfathomable in scope, humans reach for the lexicon that exists to describe mystery: that of religion. Nearly a decade ago, Anthony Levandowski, an early actor in Google’s self-driving car project, started a church called Way of the Future, whose IRS filings state that it is devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” according to Wired. Encountering an early chatbot that appeared eerily sentient, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote, “Who am I to tell God where He can and can’t put souls?” Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, once gathered his colleagues around a fire pit at a company offsite. Holding up an effigy, he explained that it represented an AI that was misaligned with humans. Then he consigned it to the flames, like a medieval cleric burning a witch.

It was only a matter of time before the Catholic Church waded into this maelstrom. Following industrialization in the late nineteenth century, the rise of mass media in the mid-twentieth, and the birth of the knowledge economy in the late twentieth, the church responded with encyclicals, papal letters laying out how Catholic doctrine applied to each upheaval. Now the Vatican has stepped in again, defending its conception of human dignity and the purpose of creation in the face of the AI revolution. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), the first encyclical of his pontificate, is nothing if not ambitious. The subtitle telegraphs its scope: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

The first part of the pope’s argument says what it was bound to say, that humans are exceptional. The church has always preached that humans are created in God’s image; by assuming the messy fragility of human form, God’s son sanctified human experience. As technologists debate whether AI systems’ possible consciousness warrants a machine version of human rights, the pope insists that humans and machines differ fundamentally. AI systems “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence,” the encyclical states. “Even when these tools are described as capable of ‘learning,’ . . . it is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity.”

The difference between “data” and “experience” is subtle.

To many laypersons, Catholic or otherwise, the church’s position will feel affirming. When Google’s co-founder Larry Page stated that machines represent a higher form of intelligence, making human extinction an untroubling evolutionary event, most people responded with revulsion. Whereas futurists look forward to achieving eternal life by uploading their brains to the cloud, many prefer a more........

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