Tucked deep within Pope Leo’s first encyclical is a request for forgiveness regarding the Church’s failure to clearly condemn slavery before it did. The pertinent paragraph (176) is this:
In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice—given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned—there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.
There are many interesting things about this paragraph, but let us start with why it appears in a letter dedicated to the challenges Artificial Intelligence poses to humanity.
The topic of slavery, in a general sense, plays an important role in Magnifica Humanitas. My find function revealed twenty occurrences of the word. The key idea is that the AI revolution has the capacity to create “new forms of slavery.” In particular, “a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit” (MH 172). When efficiency is given a higher value than human freedom and dignity, the development of AI, with its superior calculating power, can be used to reduce whole classes of human beings to a “subordination akin to slavery.” Although the pope is concerned about a conceptual degradation of the human being, he also speaks of the concrete exploitation of human bodies in supplying the labor to build the machines, the extraction of the minerals they require, and a consumptive energy infrastructure to feed them at the expense of other needs. In such a situation, the dignity and magnificence of the human being must be asserted.
