Can the new pope give Big Tech and AI a conscience?

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The AI Pope? The Pope for AI times, anyway.

Just over a century ago, Pope Leo XIII stood for workers and humanity over the creeping inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution. It seems Leo the XIV is spoiling for the same kind of fight, and boy do we need that.

It's been almost ten years since I wrote a story titled, "A billion useless people...but not one seems very concerned." I've worried about it almost every day since then. Long before the moniker AI was on every tech publicist's lips, smart people around the world were already predicting that robots would soon eliminate whole classes of work. Oxford University ranked 700 jobs at risk of "computerization" and...well, most people will be surprised how high their career ranks on the list (I'm looking at you, lawyers).

I now realize "a billion" was probably being optimistic. What will the world look like when there are no jobs for most people? On a parallel track, I've long been worried about the land hoarding problem -- there are no homes for young people today, and there are no properties for small business owners to buy either.

In one sense, I am comfortable saying that predictions of this quick-arriving AI world are wildly overexaggerated, in a dot-com-bubble kind of way. Computers are good at repetition and bad at exceptions. Real life is full of exceptional circumstances that will foil AI for years to come. Just watch what happens when a self-driving car meets an urban parking situation, for example.

But AI will do what Big Tech always wants new tech to do -- help corporations cut costs. Customer service, already hanging on by a thread, will soon be doomed forever to the land of chatbots. But that's just a symptom. In the next few years, you're going to see Wall Street cheer every time a company lays off workers and credits entreprise-wide AI implementation. Some hired economist will blah-blah-blah about re-training workers for even better jobs. Tell that to all the 50-something single moms out there who must find new careers to get health insurance for their kids.

This "progress" feels pretty inevitable. That's why it's so important that a world figure like the new pope said he was ready to take on this challenge. In his very first speech to the College of Cardinals, he warned that AI is a threat to “human dignity, justice and labor." That's quite a tech-savvy statement for a 69-year-old missionary. The man holds a mathematics degree, so Big Tech would be unwise to underestimate him. This New York Times story offers a bit more insight into the complex tech debate the new pope has waded into.

As always, the issue is even more complex, and more fundamental, than AI. And that's why the name Leo XIV matters. The name Pope Leo XIII doesn't fall trippingly off the tongue, even for Catholics, but his papacy came at a time of similar upheaval in world economics -- the late Industrial Revolution.

Leo XIII's signature publication is called Rerum Novarum -- strictly speaking, "Of New Things." A refreshingly simple name for a momentous topic. I know what you're thinking: why should any economist care what a pope says? Read it for yourself and you'll see why: it's remarkably balanced and thoughtful, with conclusions that are still highly relevant today.

At the time, capitalists were running roughshod over workers by forming gigantic, all-powerful trusts -- think Standard Oil and the Rockefellers. Naturally, worker revolts were increasingly common, and worker anger helped fuel the rise of communism and socialism.

Rerum Novarum, published in 1891 -- sometimes referred to as "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor" -- called out for worker dignity and fair pay. One example: "Some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class."

On the other hand, it also described the importance of private property. In the same breath, the document rejects socialism and property redistribution outright, saying it would give governments an outsized role in controlling individual lives. It says, "Their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community. "

On the other, other hand, the encyclical cautions against what I have come to call property hoarding. While individuals should have the right to own property -- to possess that which they have invested themselves in -- property should ultimately be used for the common good. Rerum Novaram laid the groundwork for a later encyclical written by Pope Pius XI during the Depression warning about the "twin rocks of shipwreck" -- individualism on one side and collectivism on the other. Quiet a poetic turn of phrase, but also, quite a pragmatic, dualistic view of the world. The kind of balance our Blue vs Red world is sorely lacking today.

I'm sure you are thinking that Leo XIII did not manage to stop the Russian Revolution, or the American Communist movement, or even the excessive individualism that has led to American property hoarding today. And you are right. I hold no fantasy that the new pope can ward off the scary future that artificial intelligence might bring. On the other hand, who else will stick up for worker rights, and individual property rights, in our time? You'll have to wait a long time before Big Tech companies prioritize a healthy middle class.

The Catholic church has many problems of its own to address, and I hope the new pope faces them head-on. But I am thrilled that concerns about artificial intelligence were among the first words out of the new pontiff's mouth. We can only hope more world leaders join him.