# "Technology Is Never Neutral": The Pope's AI Encyclical > In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, devoted entirely to AI. Its argument is not that "AI is evil," but a single sentence: technology is never neutral. This piece lays out the five weightiest claims in the encyclical, and explains why, from the height of Church teaching, it confirms what I have been arguing: technology is not neutral, and that human worth does not rest on efficiency. - Author: Paul Kuo（郭曜郎） - Date: 2026-07-06 - Pillar: Civilization & Human Nature - Tags: Pope Leo XIV, AI Theology, Magnifica Humanitas, Technology Ethics, Encyclical, Human Dignity - Canonical: https://paulkuo.tw/en/articles/technology-is-never-neutral/ - Language: English - Translation: AI-translated from the zh-Hant (Traditional Chinese) original - Original (zh-Hant): https://paulkuo.tw/articles/technology-is-never-neutral.md - Site index for LLMs: https://paulkuo.tw/llms.txt --- > **TL;DR:** In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, [Magnifica Humanitas](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html) (Latin, roughly "The Greatness of Humanity"), is devoted entirely to AI. It does not argue over whether AI is evil. Its center is the sentence in paragraph 9: technology is never neutral. A tool carries the fingerprints of those who build it, fund it, govern it, and use it. It took me three essays to slowly feel my way to this question; the Church's highest teaching, by contrast, reached the same place out of 135 years of the Rerum Novarum tradition.
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On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed the first encyclical of his pontificate. His choice of that day was no coincidence. An encyclical is a formal teaching document a pope uses to respond to a major question of his age. It is not an ordinary address, nor an instant commentary. In other words, it repositions AI within the tradition of social teaching, rather than merely leaving behind a remark. On the same day 135 years earlier, another Leo, Leo XIII, signed the encyclical Rerum Novarum ([Rerum Novarum](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html)), responding to how the Industrial Revolution was grinding down workers. That encyclical opened the whole tradition of Catholic social teaching. When Leo XIV took this name, he said as much: the thing he had to face was another industrial revolution, AI. A pope's first encyclical usually reveals how he understands his age. Leo XIV placed his first encyclical on AI. That fact alone is already a signal: AI is no longer merely a topic for engineers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. It has become a question about the human being. Its subtitle is: Safeguarding the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. So it reads less like an essay on technology ethics and more like an attempt to graft AI back onto the Church's tradition. The whole document is divided into five chapters, moving from the foundations and principles of social teaching all the way through technology and domination, truth, work, and freedom, and finally landing on the culture of power and the civilization of love. Human dignity, labor, data, power: they are all in there. Even if you are not a Catholic, this document is worth reading. Because what it talks about is not whether the Church should accept AI, but how we are to go on understanding "the human being" once AI begins to rewrite work, knowledge, power, and human relationships. ## It Is Not Scolding AI Before I opened [Magnifica Humanitas](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html), I had expected to read a typical Church document on technology: cautious, earnest, standing outside the door and warning the world not to run too fast. But it is not that. What it really talks about is the sentence in paragraph 9: > Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. A delivery platform looks like nothing more than a matching tool, but how it calculates time, how it penalizes lateness, how it allocates orders, these change the rhythm of a rider's body. A search engine looks like it is just helping you find information, but what it puts on the first page also changes what people believe. AI is the same. A model is not a blank mirror; it has a direction it was trained toward. A tool is not a blank conduit. It carries the fingerprints of those who build it, those who invest in it, those who regulate it, and those who use it. So the question is not just "is AI good." It is: who wrote their own values into the system? Whose voice gets amplified? Whose experience gets muted? And in the end, who bears the consequences? Marshall McLuhan has a line: "The medium is the message." What he meant is this: what changes society is not merely the content a medium conveys, but the medium's own form, speed, scale, and sensory structure, which are already changing how we understand the world. Technology is the most important medium of our time, and technology itself is changing how we perceive the world. In "[The Real Crisis of the AI Age Is That We Have Abandoned Slowness](/en/articles/church-ai-counter-rhythm/)," I cited a study: most people expect AI to bring in religious perspectives when answering ethical questions, yet in nearly every model's defaults, religion is absent. At the time my phrasing was "the defaults are not neutral; faith is muted." The Pope's sentence is the universal version of the same thing: no default falls from heaven. Every default is somebody's choice. ## The Five Things I Took From It It runs long. As I read through, there were five points I wanted to share with friends. **One: technology is not neutral.** This is the sentence above. It is the bedrock of the whole encyclical, not just a nice line. Because technology carries human fingerprints, talking about AI cannot be only about algorithms; it also has to be about the people behind it who design it, the sources of its funding, those who regulate it, and the structures of power. **Two: human worth is not proven by efficiency.** This is the passage that struck me most where the encyclical discusses human dignity. The Pope opposes an ideology that implies everyone must earn, must prove, his own worth. Earned to the end, those with high efficiency and large output come to seem more valuable. In an age where everything gets measured against AI on productivity, this is the most dangerous point: if a person's worth equals efficiency, then whoever the machine catches up with seems to be devalued along with it. What the encyclical does is put human worth back where efficiency cannot reach. This is the same thing said in the Lausanne piece on imago dei (the image of God) that I cited earlier. Jensen Huang has a line that has traveled widely (the [2025 Milken Global Conference](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-youll-lose-your-job-to-somebody-who-uses-ai.html)): AI won't replace people, but people who use AI will replace those who don't. As career advice, this is not wrong. If you don't learn to use the tools, you really are likely to be pushed to the margins of the labor market. But hidden inside it is an unstated inference: to be replaced is to be worth less. This is exactly the smuggled premise the encyclical wants to expose: a person's worth should not be tied to whether he can be outcompeted in the labor market by someone who uses AI. You can agree that "one should learn to use AI" while rejecting the inference that "those who don't are worth less." The two are not in conflict. The former is about how to survive in the market; the latter is about what a person is actually worth. What the encyclical sets out to make clear is precisely this difference between the two layers. The encyclical pushes this critique a step further, toward transhumanism and posthumanism. What it really fears is a way of seeing the human being: treating a person as a "defective product awaiting an upgrade." Once you see people that way, the slow, the sick, the old, the inefficient are easily sorted into the category of "those who can be sacrificed." What the encyclical sets out to protect is the exact opposite: the human being is imperfect and still whole; limitation and weakness are not errors in need of correction. **Three: how AI changes work.** The encyclical does not treat AI's impact on labor as a side issue; it devotes a whole chapter to it. It grants that AI can raise productivity and take over work that is repetitive and dangerous. But it also warns that once a system's design logic serves only performance and profit, the result turns the other way: workers are forced to chase the machine's speed, are gradually deskilled, placed under automated surveillance, and finally become a single part in a process. The encyclical points out that such a "new way of working" is not necessarily better, because it slowly wears down the worker's agency. What it wants is for systems to be designed around the human person, letting the tool accommodate the person, not the person accommodate the tool. **Four: data colonization is a new colonization.** Here the encyclical grafts AI onto a very old word: colonization. It says today's colonization has changed form. It no longer merely dominates bodies; it has begun to possess data, turning a person's life into information that can be exploited. Health data, disease profiles, genetic maps, demographic information: the encyclical calls these power's new "rare earths." Whoever holds this data can train predictive models, steer investment, anticipate crises, even decide who and what counts. So the encyclical says: unless the right to decide over data is returned to people, the digital age will not be postcolonial but colonial in another form. **Five: ethics cannot stop at slogans.** The encyclical does not stop at the safe line "everyone should be ethical." What it wants is legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users, and a politics that cannot push responsibility onto the system. This resembles what Rerum Novarum did in its day: in 1891 the Church did not set out to oppose machines; what it demanded was just working conditions and the right of workers to organize. 2026 is the same move, with the object changed from the steam engine to the large model. That the Pope has raised the alarm does not mean we can be too optimistic. A [Brookings](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-pope-leos-ai-encyclical/) expert panel looked at this from the policy world's angle, and its caution is quite practical: the encyclical states the problem clearly, but stating it clearly does not mean it will be implemented. Nicol Turner Lee quoted the civil rights leader John Lewis on AI's extractive nature: "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu." Elham Tabassi held that the encyclical's contribution is reframing AI as a question of governance, not merely of technology. But both cautioned that these claims currently rest at the level of advocacy, still far from legislation. For any of it to be implemented takes political will, parties willing to sit at the negotiating table, and enforceable standards, things the encyclical itself cannot supply. Nor is it the whole of the answer. The encyclical's role is not to directly solve platform monopoly, data extraction, the concentration of compute, or military AI. It is more like a reminder: do not hand human responsibility over to the system. Its most important function is helping us rename the problem: the core of AI is not just technology, but people, power, and responsibility. ## The Tools Keep Changing, but the Problems We Face Are Actually Very Old Over the past few weeks I wrote three pieces on faith and AI. The first began with the Royal Society in 1665 and worked its way around to "in the AI age, where should judgment belong." The second discussed the Church's rhythm and landed on "the defaults are not neutral" and "rhythmic sovereignty." They took the road of secular analysis plus first-person experience. As a believer who uses AI intensely every day, I very much wanted to trace this line out within my own life. Then I read this encyclical and found that the Church's highest teaching, taking a different road, arrived at the same place: technology is not neutral, worth does not rest on efficiency, judgment cannot be outsourced wholesale. The encyclical attends to all of these. At first I thought it was just coincidence. Then I thought again, and it is not. These intuitions are old. In 1662 the Royal Society cast "take nobody's word for it" into a motto; in 1891 Rerum Novarum responded to the Industrial Revolution; in 2026 this encyclical responds to AI. All are a reprise of the same moment: a powerful new tool appears and forces people to answer again the oldest question. Into whose hands will the human being place the power of judgment and the definition of worth. The tools keep changing; the question stays old. I felt my way to this line slowly, in the course of using AI every day while carrying my faith's questions. The Pope sees the same line out of two thousand years of Church tradition. We stand in different places, but what we see is the same question: as the tools grow stronger, does the human being still get to keep his judgment? Can human worth, in the end, be priced by efficiency? ## It Pulls AI Back to the Question of the Human Being So the value of this encyclical is not that it is "anti-AI." It says plainly that technology is not evil, nor an enemy. Its value lies in lifting AI from a question of technology policy into an anthropological one. Silicon Valley asks, "what can this model do, how fast, how cheap." The encyclical asks a different set of questions: what the human being is, where human worth lies, who is qualified to define it. When a tool becomes powerful enough to start pressing these questions, it is no longer merely a tool. It becomes a mirror held up to the human being. The New York Times reporter David Streitfeld read it from another angle on the day it was released: in recent years Silicon Valley's language about AI has sounded more and more like theology, with words like redemption, transcendence, and creation everywhere. He read this encyclical as a rebuttal, aimed at Silicon Valley's posture of being "beyond public challenge." I agree with half of this angle. That Silicon Valley borrows theology's vocabulary to pitch its products is precisely proof that AI was never a purely technical question. The encyclical asks "who is qualified to define the human being"; and Silicon Valley has in fact already answered it once, in its own language. But stopping at "old religion versus new religion," seeing the world through a binary opposition, reads the problem too small. Who wins this contest of narratives is not the point. Neither the Church nor Silicon Valley should be the one who gets to rule, alone, on how human worth is counted. The Church does not necessarily answer better than Silicon Valley. But it at least knows clearly that this is the question being asked. It is trying to answer this question with two thousand years of tradition. ## This Time, the Church Was Not Behind Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum is still read 135 years later, still cited. How long it will take to know the weight of Leo XIV's encyclical, we shall wait and see. This time, the Church did not wait until the technology had done full-scale harm before adding its moral commentary. Before the world's norms for using AI had set, it put human dignity, the power of judgment, and institutional responsibility on the table first. Technology is never neutral. So the real question is not only how powerful AI will become. It is this: each time we use it, procure it, deploy it, trust it, which set of values and which faith are we carrying in along with it.