Extract from Melina Efstathiou’s article, “Magnifica Humanitas. Machina Exarmanda.”
On Artificial Intelligence, Human Intelligence and the Ethical Intelligence the debate keeps missing
I was in Italy when the Pope issued his first encyclical.
I did not plan it that way. I was in Milan for Future Lawyer Europe, speaking to rooms full of lawyers about AI, governance and the future of the profession. And on the 25th of May, from the Vatican’s Synod Hall, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — Magnificent Humanity — an 82-page theological text that managed to say more clearly, and more urgently, what the legal AI governance conversation has been circling for two years without quite landing: That the debate about artificial intelligence is not, at its root, a technology debate. It is a debate about what kind of intelligence we are actually choosing to exercise.
And I have been waiting all week to write about it.
