Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, and the Vatican science advisors

[AUDIO LOGO] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday.

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POPE LEO XIV: Dear brothers and sisters, I want to thank all of you for being here today for your interest. I sincerely thank those–

FLORA LICHTMAN: On Monday, Pope Leo presented his encyclical, an open letter from the church on AI. The 40,000-plus word document covers a lot of terrain from screen time to resource extraction to job loss, but the core message is summed up in the title, Magnifica Humanitas– On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

POPE LEO XIV: Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong I know but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How did the Pope arrive at these views? There’s thousands of years of doctrine, but in addition there’s a group of scientists who convene and present to the Holy Father, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which has roots going back 400 years.

Today we’re talking to a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences who has led conferences on AI for the church. We’ll hear about this encyclical and the role of these committees. Dr. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is an anthropologist and chancellor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Marcelo, welcome to Science Friday.

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Thanks, Flora, for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thanks for being here. So Pope Leo seems to be telling us in this encyclical that we are at a crossroads, that AI could be like the Tower of Babel, a sort of sign of humanity’s arrogance. Can you walk us through this idea?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Yes, I want to start by saying this is a magnificent document– The metaphoric order, the Tower of Babel, the idea of disarming a technology in the service of humanity. So I think it’s an act of courage to put himself at the center of a debate where so much is unknown, so much magical thinking saturates.

And I think that what you really should think about, Flora, is this was such an American way of introducing an encyclical. The popes write this, and they let the others do the work. He– this is a hands on, very pragmatic, and this is a uniquely American story. It’s a story of our Pope from Chicago that shows the release of the encyclical in very unique ways.

Really I think the way the Holy Father rolled out the encyclical was uniquely American. He did it personally–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because– do you mean because of one of the co-founders of Anthropic, Christopher–

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: One issue–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Olah was there?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: One issue is that he had a number of personalities very, very carefully chosen, of course, among them the co-founder of Anthropic, a company that is at the global epicenter of a debate about the futures of artificial intelligence.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I wanted to ask you about that because the encyclical is wary of AI. And so it was surprising to see one of the co-founders of Anthropic, Christopher Olah, there. You can even– he even got to talk.

CHRISTOPHER OLAH: The machinery that makes this possible is the work of math and programming and science, but what character we choose, how it interacts with the world, how it ought to interact with the world, these are more clearly questions for the humanities, for religion, for philosophy, for society at large.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I found it perplexing. Is it that the company– these companies are so powerful now that even the Vatican, which is one of the few institutions that is more powerful than tech companies, feels like they have to be in the room with tech executives?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Flora, I think this telecasts a claim that in previous moments when momentous encyclicals were released, the issues were often issues that came under the general responsibilities of the state, of the nation state, of governments. I think that what this is highlighting the fact that now it’s in the hands of private companies that are building engineering a future in which we’re all going to be actors.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And this acknowledges that directly?

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco: Very directly by having the co-founder of one of the major AI companies, he’s telling the world, take notice, take notice. Yes, I think the concern the Holy Father has here is when the human hand, the heart, our emotional architectures are no longer in the driver’s seat. Please proceed with caution.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You are an anthropologist, so the magnificence of humanity seems like it must be up your personal alley. How does– how did the– did that get filtered through any of your work?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Flora, I don’t get to lobby in that sense. The work of the academies is work that responds to the concerns, to the interests of the Holy Father. It’s very, very important to highlight that this encyclical is deeply, deeply rooted in the history of the social doctrine of the church. That’s the most anthropological of all the encyclicals maybe. And that is, of course, by his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who wrote in the Industrial Revolution on the need to protect workers, their dignity, and their rights. It is a plea to protect human dignity, and as such, it joins a very, very significant global conversation that has been focused too much, too much on the technological side of the equation, not enough on the human side of the equation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I understand that you have led conversations at the academy about AI. We know AI is contentious. You have scientists from all over the world. Do those conversations get heated? What’s that discussion like?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Yes, I would say that there were three conceptual domains at the heart of AI where most of the passionate let’s call them exchanges unfolded. First, what will augment human capabilities, make us all better off, and what will make us redundant, replace us? I think as importantly here was the issue of the unfolding of these technologies into systems in industry, in governance, into education, and that is entirely under-theorized.

I think we live in a moment, Flora, of two tensions, a kind of a techno effervescence that just is everywhere in Silicon Valley, a place in the world I very well. I spent time at Stanford. I spent many years at Berkeley. So this is a world I understand.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Techno effervescence is my favorite way of describing it, Yes, we do.

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: And it’s techno panic. I mean, if you do just basic surveys, folk are extraordinarily concerned. So this dialectic between techno effervescence and techno panic needs to be resolved to get into a techno coexistence in the service of humanity. Science will benefit enormously from AI. We had at one of the summits one of the leading vaccinologists in the world talk about how the development of vaccines, the development of medical breakthroughs is being enhanced dramatically. But there’s also a dark, a side that dehumanizes us, a side that makes us tools, clocks in a machinery without a heart.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break, but when we come back, I want to go behind the scenes with you about what the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences meetings are like. Stay with us.

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Marcelo, can you take us behind the scenes a bit? What is this gig like?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Well, it’s been involved in various capacities with the academy for about two decades now, and it’s a scholarly, it’s a scientific academy. Its origins really go back to Galileo. It was Galileo’s academy, and it is entirely secular in that our colleagues come from all faiths, all religions, all nationalities, all disciplines.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How are members selected? Is there a pontifical type? Do you have to be a little bit soulful if not spiritual?

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco: No, not at all. Many of my colleagues are not Catholics. No, all religions, all nationalities, entirely secular.

So you’re nominated. It takes a long, long, long time. The main work I did for Francis way, way back over the last beginning before Francis actually was on immigration and on refugee flows. That’s my area of expertise. My wife is an academic. Together we founded the Harvard Immigration Projects. That’s how they became interested in our work.

I just got a call one day from a cardinal and a bishop in the church saying, hey, Marcelo, we understand you’re a scholar of immigration. Can we come and see you? And we were doing the largest study of its kind in our country. And I said, of course. Come.

I’m nominally Catholic. I’m Argentine, so I’m culturally Catholic. It’s just in the air as you walk about the streets of Buenos Aires with a Malbec and with the stakes. It’s– that Catholicism is there.

And then one day, I got an email from Pope Francis. I thought it was a joke.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Stop! No.

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Yes. You just get an email from Pope Francis saying you have been elected, and I have appointed you a member of the Council, which is the executor.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like at Pope Francis at gmail.com?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Something like that. It’s dot VA for Vatican.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you get to interface with the Holy Father? Do you send a memo? How does he engage with your ideas?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Yeah. So the Holy Father would attend our gatherings. Francis attended multiple times. And he comes with us. He makes his own reflections. Sometimes he asks questions. Sometimes there are side chats with the Holy Father.

My very, very last encounter with Pope Francis was at his home in the Domus Santa Marta. We had gathered for a very significant summit on building resilience for climate change, for AI, for all these major developments facing humanity. And we had a very informal exchange.

I’m Argentine, the Holy Father, Pope Francis was Argentine. Of course, if you’re Argentine, you talk about soccer. Big mistake to debate the Holy Father on soccer, which I did. He’s always right, and you’re always wrong.

And then he very lovingly but very firmly is referring to the work of building resilience. He said in his Argentine-accented Spanish, Marcelo, adelante, siempre adelante. That’s St. Ignatius. That’s forward. We have to move forward.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I– bring me into the room in one of these meetings. What does it look like? Are they at the Vatican? Is the catering good?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: So the meetings are at the historic Casina Pio 4, which was a summer palace for the popes. Between us, it’s the most beautiful building in the Vatican. In the back, we have Francis’s turtles that come out at noon and sunbathe under the beautiful Roman skies.

It’s– they’re entirely scholarly gatherings. They’re very global. Imagine a workshop at the University of Massachusetts Boston or at UCLA or at Harvard. These are university–

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is sounding less exotic by the minute.

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: With– and it’s entirely the free exchange of ideas. And everyone understands the weight of an academy that began really in the 1600s that has been a very powerful instrument for the popes to reflect upon matters of scholarly and scientific interest. To give you a sense, at any moment, there are over 50 Nobel laureates who are members of the academy, and, again, the academicians that get selected are folk of enormous renown. And when you achieve enormous renown, you come to understand the fragility.

We live in the age of fragility. We live in the age of uncertainty. And we live in the age of vertigo. And I think all the academicians live in that trinity– fragility, uncertainty, vertigo. Just things are– and AI is at the heart of the vertigo piece. The human systems are not very well adapted to the kinds of by the minute changes that AI represents.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to call back to something you mentioned earlier about this coexistence of techno effervescence right now and techno panic. How do you see the role of the church versus the role of science in resolving that tension?

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Yeah. So we– that’s a wonderful question, and it really goes into the heart of the purpose of the academies. The academy’s motto is faith and reason. Science and faith are distinct domains. Our domain is the domain of scholarship and of science, always guided by these fundamental tenants that are at the heart of the social doctrine of the church.

By the way, this encyclical, the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, is I think, my opinion, the most brilliant synthesis of the social doctrine of the church ever written. It highlights our obligations as members of the human family to each other, to nature, to the future generations.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Pope Leo said something exactly about this. Let’s hear it.

POPE LEO XIV: We do not possess the technical answers, nor do we seek to displace those with expertise. But we bring a wisdom concerning the human that our present time desperately needs.

MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Amen.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Marcelo, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

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MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Welcome, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I really appreciate it. That was great. Dr. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is an anthropologist and chancellor at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This podcast was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. If you liked it, consider leaving us a review or a rating on your favorite platform of choice. Thank you for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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