Three hundred thousand people filled the streets of Paris on Friday to welcome Pope Leo XIV, the American-born pontiff who has made artificial intelligence one of the defining concerns of his time in Rome. The crowd came for the spiritual leader. What he gave them was something closer to a reckoning.
Standing beside French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace, and later at UNESCO headquarters, Leo XIV delivered a warning that cut across geopolitics, technology, and what he called the very definition of being human. Artificial intelligence, he said, was building a “paradise of machines.” Humanity was walking straight into it with no clear plan for what gets left behind.
“If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and conditioning our daily lives,” he told the gathered diplomats and UN officials, “there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment.”
From the Vatican to UNESCO
The France trip, the first papal visit to the country in 18 years, was always going to carry symbolic weight. But the content of Leo’s remarks made clear this was more than a pastoral tour. It was a position paper delivered from two of the most consequential rooms in Paris.
His stops mapped a deliberate argument. The Elysee Palace is where policy gets made. UNESCO is where culture and knowledge get negotiated at a global level. Choosing those two venues for his opening remarks sent a signal: this conversation belongs in rooms where decisions happen, not just in cathedrals.
Leo’s concern with AI goes back to the beginning of his pontificate. When he addressed the College of Cardinals for the first time after his election in May 2025, he framed the challenge directly: “In our own day, the Church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”
That sentence drew a deliberate line from the original industrial revolution, the one that reshaped labor and family life across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the transformation now underway. The Church had something to say about both, and Leo’s argument is that the lessons of the first should shape how we navigate the second.
His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), expanded the argument into doctrine. He called for robust international regulation of AI and challenged developers directly: build for the common good rather than for profit margins.
The Efficiency Trap
What sharpens Leo’s critique beyond a general call for caution is the specific mechanism he identifies. The danger, in his framing, has nothing to do with machines becoming hostile. It’s that people start applying machine logic to each other.
A system built for efficiency will eventually evaluate everything by that standard, including the people around it. Leo put it plainly: human beings risk being “judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.”
That lands differently than the usual AI debate, which tends to cluster around job displacement, misinformation, or distant projections about superintelligent systems. Leo points at something more immediate: a social and moral atmosphere in which the dominant measure of a person becomes their output. Where someone who cannot compete with an algorithm loses a claim on dignity.
He extended the same logic to other technologies he sees following the same pattern. During his France remarks he pushed back on genetic manipulation, the trade in human organs, and “the possibility of arranging one’s own death,” a direct reference to France’s recent legalization of assisted dying. The common thread in all of these, for Leo, is the same reductive impulse: human life as a problem to be solved rather than a value to be protected.
The Spiritual Stakes
The title of his encyclical rewards attention. Magnificent Humanity is a declaration. It asserts that human beings carry worth that predates any measurement system, any productivity metric, any algorithm. That assertion is the lens through which Leo reads the AI moment.
The risk he sees is not that AI surpasses us but that we allow it to define us. That we come to understand ourselves through the categories machines use rather than the other way around.
In Paris, he gave that concern its sharpest formulation yet. The “paradise of machines” phrase is doing something specific. A paradise is, by definition, a perfected state, something worth moving toward. Leo is warning that a growing number of people, institutions, and systems now treat technological efficiency as the endpoint of human progress. And that this represents a category error with real consequences for how societies treat their most vulnerable members.
He was explicit that the problem can’t be solved by slowing technology alone. “There is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment.” The tool is not the issue. The culture that evaluates everything through the tool’s logic is.
300,000 People and a Question
The crowds in Paris were not there for a policy seminar. They came for the faith, the ritual, the sense of connection a papal visit carries. But the question at the center of Leo’s remarks had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the moment all of us are living through.
What does it mean to be human when machines can do most of what we have historically used to measure human worth?
Leo’s answer is that the question itself is the point. Not solving it, but refusing to let it dissolve into a default answer handed down by whoever builds the next system. His call for “education in ethical discernment” is a call for a culture that thinks critically about these tools rather than adapting to them passively.
The pope did not offer a blueprint on Friday. He offered a threshold: the line between a world where humanity sets the terms for its tools and one where the tools start setting them for us.
Three hundred thousand people watched him say it. The question is who was listening.
Pope Leo XIV continues his France visit through September 28, 2026. He is expected to address young people at Stade de France on Saturday.
Sources: Al Jazeera, NPR/Houston Public Media, CBC News, Yahoo News
Chris Meredith writes about AI, technology, and what it actually means for real people. Follow along on Substack: monkeyattack.substack.com
