Pope Leo XIV's encyclical challenges Silicon Valley's vision of intelligence as commodity

On a March morning in 2026, Sam Altman stood before an audience and described his vision for the future: intelligence would become a public utility, bought and sold like electricity or water, dispensed by the meter to whoever could afford it. The CEO of OpenAI seemed not to grasp what he was saying, or perhaps he understood perfectly and simply did not care. Intelligence, as it turns out, is not a thing that can be metered and sold. It is a quality of human existence—fragile, embodied, irreplaceable. To attempt to commodify it is either fraud or a catastrophic misunderstanding of what we are.

Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," took direct aim at this vision and the technological logic that sustains it. The document arrives at a moment when Silicon Valley's architects have begun to reshape human life according to their own designs, when the body itself has become a territory of ideological dispute, when the tools we use to think, work, love, and speak are increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations. The Pope's voice, though the papacy no longer wields the temporal power it once did, carries a moral weight that philosophers like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich—who warned of these dangers decades ago—never possessed. Few read those thinkers. Everyone listens to Rome.

The encyclical rests on a deceptively simple claim: technology is not neutral. This idea cuts against the grain of Silicon Valley's favorite mythology. The industry insists that machines are merely tools, that their moral character depends entirely on how we use them. This is false, Leo XIV argues. Every technological advance embodies a specific vision of what human beings are and what they should become. It privileges certain capacities and erases others. It demands certain forms of energy and certain forms of control. The data centers that power OpenAI and Meta consume several gigawatts of electricity—enough to sustain thousands of homes. This is not incidental. The technology itself, in its very design, forces those who use it to participate in a particular idea of humanity, one built on extraction, scale, and the reduction of all value to quantity.

At the heart of the encyclical lies a second conviction: human existence is fundamentally embodied. We are creatures of flesh and vulnerability, subject to pain, mortality, and limitation. The great myths of human civilization—Prometheus stealing fire, Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge, Faust's bargain with darkness—all warn of the same danger: that when we exceed the proper scale of human ambition, when we refuse to accept our fragility, we invite catastrophe. Only by accepting our limits, by integrating suffering into our understanding of what it means to live, can we receive the gifts that are meant for us. To imagine that we can transcend these boundaries in the name of progress is to abandon our humanity altogether.

This leads to the encyclical's most radical claim: the very meaning of progress must be inverted. True advancement does not mean replacing human labor with machines. It means creating more dignified work. It does not mean concentrating wealth and power in the hands of those who control the algorithms. It means recognizing that patents, data, digital platforms, and technological infrastructure are now primary goods that belong, by eternal right, to all people. In a world where the benefits of technological change flow only to the few, while the costs are borne by the vulnerable, what we call progress is actually barbarism.

Leo XIV quotes Gandalf from Tolkien's great work: "It is not for us to master all the tides of the world, but to do what lies in our power for the good of the days in which we live, rooting out evil in the fields we know, and leaving to those who come after a clean land for the tilling." Progress, understood rightly, is not about control. It is about recognizing that we cannot do everything, and that this recognition creates space for the freedom of others. It is about building communities at human scale, where people encounter one another face to face, where time is spent together—even time that seems wasted. These are the conditions in which authentic fraternity becomes possible, in which war becomes harder to imagine.

The encyclical will be studied and debated for years, its reach comparable to Leo XIII's "Rerum Novarum" more than a century ago. The powerful of Silicon Valley and Wall Street will likely hear of it only in passing, if at all, and will choose not to listen. But the document speaks not only to the powerful, to show them their depravity. It speaks also to the poor and the humble, reminding them that there is dignity in a simple life, and that they are called, from time to time, to raise their voices and offer resistance to evil. The question now is whether anyone is listening.