Chapter 33Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

• explain the choice the encyclical sets out between building Babel and rebuilding Jerusalem;
• say why AI is “never neutral” and why its “intelligence” differs from human intelligence;
• apply the principles of social doctrine to data, algorithms and digital power;
• outline what it asks for on truth, work, freedom and war, including human control over lethal decisions.

The human person is the measure of technology. The encyclical opens with a choice: humanity can “construct a new Tower of Babel” or “build the city in which God and humanity dwell together”. Babel (Gen 11) is a project of pride and uniformity, “a single language, a single technology, a single direction”, that sacrifices human dignity for efficiency. The rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls under Nehemiah (Neh 2–6) is the opposite: each family rebuilds its own section of the wall, with God at the centre. The real choice, the encyclical says, “is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology”, but between these two ways of building: we are to be “builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel”.

Technology “is not inherently evil”, and it has improved human life, but in practice it is never neutral: it “takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”. AI systems “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence”. They often surpass people in speed, yet they have no body and no experiences, feel no joy or pain and have no moral conscience; their “learning” is statistical adaptation to data, not inner growth. Responsibility therefore always stays with human beings: those who design systems, those who deploy them and those who rely on them to decide.

• The technocratic paradigm, now digital. Taken from Laudato Si': the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shaping decisions. AI amplifies it, and “when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value”, people are tempted to see themselves as “a project to be optimized”.
• Concentrated, largely private power. Platforms, data, infrastructure and computing power are held mostly by major private, often transnational, actors rather than States, which makes that power opaque and hard to direct toward the common good.
• The principles applied to the digital world. The universal destination of goods now covers patents, algorithms, platforms, infrastructure and data; subsidiarity asks that digital rules not be imposed opaquely from above; solidarity and social justice look to hidden workers and to those excluded by opaque algorithms.
• Accountability, not just “alignment”. Decisions on credit, jobs or services must stay understandable and contestable, with someone answerable for them: “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”
• Truth, work and freedom. Truth is a common good threatened by disinformation; work is “the essential key” to the social question, and jobs must not be sacrificed to profit alone; the “digital attention economy”, surveillance and new forms of slavery threaten freedom.
• Human control over force. The decision to use lethal force “must remain under effective, self-aware and responsible human control”: “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”