Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, on artificial intelligence and the human person, was released on May 25. Magnifica Humanitas asks whether the age of artificial intelligence will become another Tower of Babel or a city in which the dignity of every person is safeguarded.

Leo takes the contrast from Genesis. The builders of Babel, he writes, set out to “make a name” for themselves with “a single language, a single technology, a single direction,” but the project “sacrifices human dignity for efficiency” and reduces the person to “data and performance.” The counter-image in the encyclical is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, where each family and each artisan takes a portion of the wall and the city rises through shared responsibility. The question is which of these construction sites the age of AI will turn out to be.

The encyclical is concerned that human beings might come to see themselves and one another as systems to be optimized, persons to be processed, or templates whose differences can be smoothed away in the name of efficiency. That concern is a Jewish one as well.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik gave the Jewish tradition its sharpest modern reading of this problem. In The Lonely Man of Faith, published in Tradition in 1965, Rabbi Soloveitchik distinguished between two accounts of the human in the opening chapters of Genesis. Adam the first, the Adam of Genesis 1, is the majestic Adam, made in God’s image as a creator. He is called to subdue the earth, to have dominion, and........

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