The Lion and the Machine

The new occupant of St. Peter’s throne has claimed the name of the lion, and with it, his burden. For it was the last Leo who confronted the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, even as, today, we are in the midst of the equally epoch-shattering AI revolution. 

The new Pope has made the connection explicit: ‘In our own day, the Church offers everyone…its social teaching in response to another Industrial Revolution and to developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labour.’

Of course, in some ways, Leo XIII was already too late. The encyclical for which he is most known, Rerum Novarum (1891), came many decades after ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848), and would have never had the same resonance. By the late 19th century, the masses of Europe had already been corralled into factory floors to fan the flames of industry, and the momentum of a destructive reaction was already underway. In contrast, Leo XIV might still be in time: today, the real impact of AI and automation has yet to be felt, even as the use of AI is projected to accelerate.

From the Old Lion to the New

Rerum Novarum describes ‘the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.’ The Pope declared that remedying this ‘misery and wretchedness… pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class’ was urgent. 

At the same time he upheld the right to private property as fundamental:

‘Neither justice nor the common good allows…under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands on other people's possessions.’

He therefore condemned both unbridled capitalism and confiscatory socialism, insisting on the rights of workers to organise. Leo XIII also criticised ‘both laissez-faire capitalism and state-centric socialism, giving shape to a distinctly Catholic vein of economic teaching.’ The principles he outlined—private property, just wages, human dignity—remain pillars of Catholic economics today. 

The logical extension of Leo XIII’s emphasis on social justice can be found in ‘distributism’—an economic philosophy advanced in the early 20th century by Catholics G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Distributism championed wide property-ownership under the premise that, as Chesterton put it, the problem with capitalism was not ‘too many capitalists [i.e. owners of capital], but too few.’

Digital Distributism

But what are today’s ‘New Things’?

‘His name is his programme.’

These are the words of the Archbishop of Belgrade, Cardinal Ladislav Nemet, after dining with the new Pope: ‘In Leo XIII's time there was an industrial revolution…now there is a digital revolution…’

Indeed, whereas Leo XIII was dealing with industrial factories, today’s battleground lies in the realm of bytes and algorithms; Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, and the unprecedented concentration of data. 

If, as Leo XIII wrote, people should 'share in the benefits which they create,' and this is best guaranteed by 'induc[ing] as many as possible of the people to become owners,' then the user-base that creates data for AI should be enfranchised by owning some piece.

Concretely, this means the digital commons must consist of individual and community-level re-training of AI. AI must be open-source and able to run locally on commercially available hardware. 

By accessing sourcecode, communities can inspect, test and correct algorithms, ensuring they do not contain biases contrary to their users’ needs.

As Emad Mostaque, ex-CEO of Stability AI, has put it, AI programs should act as 'pizza bases' for individuals, communities and businesses to add their own toppings. You may need a supercomputer (or ‘Hyper Node’) to crunch data and produce algorithmic parameters (what we may call ‘Foundational AI’), but that product should then be exported and ‘filled-in’ with national and personal data (‘Specialised’ and ‘Personalised’ AI, respectively).

Whether it’s a farming co-op in Devon or a clinic in Mumbai, communities should be able to programme core models with their own data, culture, and priorities. 

Taming Technology

AI should be localisable by design, and this is only truly possible if it is open-source—transparent, auditable, and re-programmable—so that communities everywhere, from parish schools to local cooperatives, can shape these tools to reflect their culture and needs. 

Without this humanising push, the promise of a just digital future risks being lost to the same forces of centralisation and control that Leo XIII saw running rampant both in industrial capitalism and in the communist reaction against it.

Statement

As Leo XIII confronted the industrial era’s upheavals, Leo XIV now faces the Artificial Intelligence revolution—a revolution just as epoch-defining. The new Pope’s mission unfolds in the arena of data, and algorithms, and must result in concrete proposals for confronting the imminent shock to labour markets posed by AI. This challenge is best met by reviving Catholic ‘distributism’ in defence of localised, open-source AI so that the advantages brought by new technologies are reaped by as wide a circle of communities and businesses as possible.