AI and Catholic Social Teaching

New Video Series, "On The New Things"

Soon after his election as the 267^th Successor of Peter, Robert Cardinal Prevost explained why he chose the name of Pope Leo XIV:

“Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her 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 labor."

Pope Leo XIV has indeed made artificial intelligence a defining concern of his pontificate, with an encyclical—Magnifica humanitas (Magnificent humanity)— expected to address it directly.

In this new three-part series, the Acton Institute’s Dan Hugger sits down with scholars across economics, history, and anthropology to ask what Catholic social teaching has to say about the AI revolution, as well as what an encyclical on AI will need to grapple with.

PhD economist and Acton COO Stephen Barrows joins Dan Hugger to examine AI as the latest chapter in the long story of technological change, and perhaps the most consequential one yet.

From dis-employment fears and the future of coding to price discrimination, healthcare breakthroughs, energy costs, and the geopolitics of frontier models, this conversation traces both the disruptions AI is causing and the genuine human goods it's already delivering.

Historian Dr. John C. Pinheiro, director of research and publications at the Acton Institute, sets today’s anxieties about AI against the original Rerum Novarum and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.

Why do people work? What was actually new about the “new things”? And what can Pope Leo XIII’s prudential application of principle teach Pope Leo XIV about meeting an information revolution without falling into either Luddism or naïve optimism?

And Michael Matheson Miller, head of Acton's Center for Social Flourishing, presses the deepest question of the series. Is artificial intelligence actually intelligence? And what does the existence of these machines reveal about us?

This is a wide-ranging conversation on consciousness, embodiment, the alignment problem we've already been living through for a decade, the philosophical assumptions baked into Silicon Valley code, and why no technology can substitute for the gospel.