Yet another interesting and original perspective on Magnifica Humanitas comes from Ross Douthat of the New York Times. He suggests that the Pope generally treats AI as a normal— albeit important— technological development, whereas the most enthusiastic proponents of AI emphasize the “sheer wierdness of the technological moment it describes.” AI actually presents us with a metaphysical challenge, Douthat argues, in a way that ordinary technology does not.

An “ordinary” technological development— even a very important one, such as the printing press or the steam engine or the introduction of the internet— does not immediately pose questions about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of lie. This one does. Pope Leo addresses those questions calmly. Not everyone does.

Douthat beautifully captures a broader problem with the assumptions that underlie this encyclical and so many other statements from the Holy See:

I think that the prescriptive aspects of the encyclical suffer from the same deficiency as many prior Vatican documents, insofar as they assume a benign social-democratic world authority that conspicuously doesn’t exist.

Here Douthat puts his finger on an aspect of Vatican teaching that has irritated me for so long that I now almost treat it as an inescapable fact of life— like the constant drone of the HVAC system in an office building. (This may explain why some of my friends were more troubled by this encyclical; they haven’t been reading Vatican documents for 50 years, and were surprised by a tone that I no longer noticed.) Statements from Rome have always been marked by that unspoken complacent assumption that we are all Social Democrats now. But we aren’t.

This problem did not arise with Pope Leo, nor with Pope Francis. The same conventionally liberal political assumptions are embedded in nearly all papal pronouncements since the days of John XXIII. There was a partial respite from the monotonous background noise under John Paul II, particularly with Centesimus Annus, but never any wavering from that naive confidence in liberal institutions. To cite the most frustrating example of the phenomenon, the Vatican’s support for the UN has been unshaken, even as that institution has proven itself incapable of resolving international conflicts— and, not coincidentally, increasingly hostile to the fundamental principles of the Catholic faith.