While Anthropic was convening thinkers, the most powerful religious leader in the world was preparing to release his own moral vision for A.I. For Pope Leo XIV — a pope with a mathematics degree — the center of moral conversation about A.I. needed to focus on safeguarding people. He was finishing his first major papal treatise, or encyclical, explaining why. He titled it “Magnifica Humanitas,” or Magnificent Humanity, and argued that “humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.” “If technology becomes the ultimate criterion,” he wrote, “the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity.” He warned of the risk of “new fors of slavery” for humans, not for machines. He dismissed the idea of machine consciousness in just a few paragraphs. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” Leo wrote. Calling for the “moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of A.I. with human values” should require a shared understanding of the ethics involved. “Otherwise, those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems,” Leo said. Leo concluded that like nuclear technology, A.I. must be “disarmed.” nytimes.com/2026/09/29/…
[….] The world saw a shared stand for a human future. But Mr. Olah subtly made another case, too. “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.” t was the case he had been making in the closed-door religious meetings for months. A.I. systems “are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised,” he said. “They are made from us, from our words.” The room of church leaders was filled with an echo of the old gospel story, of the word of God becoming flesh to save humanity. It was an audacious request to the most powerful religious body in the world, and a challenge to centuries of religious understanding of humanity. “If this technology is coming, it must go well — for our common home and for the children to come,” he said. He suggested no option of having the technology not come at all. Afterward, Mr. Olah, surrounded by bodyguards, briefly took questions from journalists in Paul VI Audience Hall, the vast auditorium where popes often speak. Behind him loomed the hall’s enormous art installation “La Resurrezione” — a bronze cast of Jesus rising out of the crater of a nuclear bomb in the garden of Gethsemane.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html
I find that terrifying. Religions that lack humility and literally believe their religion real.
Jung and Campbell are the path to sanity. The Pope is right. Not because humans are magnificent and cannot be surpassed, but because they are (we are) part of a whole, an on going process, and the paradox of this reality, beyond time and space, far beyond our comprehension. Humility and wonder, a choice of serving love and growth. That is Hail Mary. The grace that is the mystery of life.