I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope.

He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with the changes which will be wrought to all our lives by artificial intelligence in the months and years ahead. AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself. If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all.

The document is deliberately cast as a successor to Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum, published 135 years ago, which outlined a distinctive approach – Catholic Social Thought – to the challenges of industrialisation and the contending ideologies of socialism and free market capitalism.

AI will bring changes to all our lives every bit as transformative as the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. It is not like any other technological breakthrough – because it is a technology that has the capacity to improve itself, to grow, learn, master and control. The speed at which AI is out-pacing human ingenuity is giddy. Many of us are familiar with Moore’s Law – the observed ability of computer chips to double their processing capacity every two years. Until recently, AI was able to double its ability to complete any human task in a set number of man hours every seven months. Now the time taken for that same – exponential – leap in power is just three months.

The tasks which AI can accomplish are not just rapid mathematical reasoning, or super-powered Google searches or instantaneous animations. AI can write computer code faster and more fluently than even the most brilliant engineers. The recently developed Mythos model pioneered by Anthropic can hack any online platform – from national defence infrastructure to our entire banking system – with a speed, ferocity and completeness that only a handful of humans can comprehend, never mind match.

But AI is not simply about speed of light advances on flickering screens. It can have a devastating impact on the physical world. AI-enabled breakthroughs – like protein folding and other life science discoveries – have the potential not just to banish disease but also, in the hands of a halfway competent biology graduate, to create lethal pathogens. AI has already transformed warfare. Ukraine’s drone defences are enabled by the processing of data which can overcome Russia’s massive superiority in manpower. America and Israel’s AI-driven precision targeting can........

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