The fictional misanthrope Dr House would often joke that if one could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. Of course, the savant made those observations before Donald Trump became president, an event so catastrophic that it has forced the most openly religious person in the world to act as a voice of reason.With the democratic powers of his home country electing the presidential version of Pope Alexander VI, a man whose foreign policy is based on nepotistic self-aggrandisement, it has fallen on the first American Pope to provide a moral compass to his countrymen and much of the WENA world. And now, like every manager in every corporate office, he’s also talking about Artificial Intelligence. Thankfully, it’s not with the zest of the corporate honcho who thinks AI can replace all sorts of wasteful workers, so the only ones making money are the CEO and shareholders.In his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity, the Pope warns of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, comparing it to the Tower of Babel and stating: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”But what exactly is the Tower of Babel? What is an encyclical? Why is the Pope talking about Artificial Intelligence? And can he be the voice of reason against largely atheist tech bros who might find Christ when it suits their narrative? And why are the sons of Abraham worried about a Deus Ex Machina? For those living under a rock, or more bothered about cockroaches or clubs, here’s a small primer.
The Tower of Babel story
For most folks who don’t read the Bible end to end, the first time they heard the term Tower of Babel may well have been in X-Men: Apocalypse, the film where an ancient mutant with god-like powers named En Sabah Nur, played by Oscar Isaac, wakes up after several millennia and decides that humanity has been a spectacularly poor use of cosmic real estate. In one of the film’s more memorable sequences, Apocalypse hijacks the world’s nuclear arsenals and launches them into space before thundering: “You can fire your arrows from the Tower of Babel, but you can never strike God!”The pulpy line takes an old religious myth and gives it a modern spin: man pointing missiles at the sky.
The Tower of Babel is a fantastical biblical allegory, what scholars call an etiological myth, in this case a story that explains why humanity speaks so many different languages. It appears in Genesis, shortly after the story of Noah’s Flood, when humanity is still imagined as one people with one language. They settle in the land of Shinar and decide to build a city and a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” and one that could overcome any flood. That is too much for an Abrahamic God who can’t abide his subjects banding together against him, so he sends a gust of wind that makes the various workers unable to converse with one another because, before Google Translate, when there’s no common language, there’s no way people can work together.And then there’s the most well-known name in that particular story: Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah. Later Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions turn Nimrod into a rebel-king who dared challenge God and shot arrows into the sky to hit him. In some versions, the arrows return bloodied, giving Nimrod the delusion that he has wounded God.Read: Why Trump TACOed against the Pope But, as Peter T Chattaway notes in Patheos, Apocalypse’s action twists the familiar legend. Nimrod aimed his arrows at God, while Apocalypse is instead aiming them at the heavens because he is a “false god”. And today, it’s Pope Leo who is comparing AI to the new Tower of Babel, with man playing God, in his new encyclical.It’s a myth that finds itself across civilisations, including the Hindu Shatapatha Brahmana, which describes asuras constructing a giant fire altar of bricks to reach heaven before they are tricked by Indra. The tale even finds its way into children’s stories with Jack and the Beanstalk.The idea finds itself across civilisations, showing unbridled human ambition, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the confusion of human language causes laughter in heaven, or Franz Kafka’s short story Das Stadtwappen, where the builders of Babel are beset by bureaucracy. Even in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a “Babel fish” is a device one can implant in one’s ear to translate any extraterrestrial speech.
Why Pope Leo called AI the new ‘Tower of Babel’
Now, before one asks, an encyclical is a papal policy document, the kind Rome still brings out when it wants to convince the world that the opinion of the Roman Catholic Church matters. It’s an extremely long Substack post usually addressed to Catholics and “people of good will”. Pope Leo’s first encyclical is titled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity, and it runs to roughly 42,300 words, suggesting that even the Vatican has discovered that AI discourse cannot be contained in a thread, and that the document helpfully wasn’t written or edited by ChatGPT. The lack of “it wasn’t X, it was Y” statements suggests it perhaps wasn’t.The document was formally signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s great intervention during the Industrial Revolution. The earlier Leo wrote when machines were changing labour. Leo XIV is writing when machines are changing the meaning of labour and perhaps the human condition.
The digital papyrus was released with Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, a self-christened “good” AI company, the kind that resigns before letting its system be used to bomb people. As the New York Times noted, Leo has been talking about AI since the start of his papacy, warning cardinals that the Church should address the risks the technology posed to “human dignity, justice, and labour”.Leo frames the dichotomy as between building a new Tower of Babel and building a city in which God and humanity can dwell together. Shading the Tower of Babel like a beta product launch, he argued that it was “conceived without reference to God”, “eliminated diversity”, and chose “homogenization over communion”.The Pope isn’t completely anti-AI, saying it can “heal, connect, educate and protect”, but warns that technology is “never neutral” because it echoes those who “devise, finance, regulate, and use it”. It sounds eerily similar to the dichotomy we found in AI earlier, when our choices appeared to be between MechaHitler, the Grok bot that threatened users with graphic harm, or Black George Washington, where Gemini couldn’t imagine a world where anyone was white or male.The Babel Syndrome, Leo warns, is “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak” and lives in the hubris that “a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance”.In his own way, the Pope is reminding folks that they are more than the culmination of stray patterns that can be duplicated by a machine. That is why Leo writes that Babel reveals the danger of any grand project that “sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing”. The old builders used brick and bitumen. The new ones use chips, cloud, capital and the sort of missionary language usually reserved for people handing out pamphlets at traffic lights. The promise is the same: one language, one system, one tower, one future, one small priesthood deciding what counts as progress.And if that sounds too dramatic, Leo makes the warning plainer elsewhere: “If, however, power grows while the heart withers and human bonds fray, then we are faced with a new form of Babel — a construction that is grandiose, yet fundamentally dehumanizing.”Which is possibly the most Vatican way of saying: there’s no point searching for God in the heavens, or trying to construct one out of thin air, when God is gone from your heart.
Abrahamic God vs Deus Ex Machina – Old Gods vs New Ones
The term Deus Ex Machina is Latin for “God from the Machine”, usually employed as a plot device when a character comes out of nowhere to save the day, like Salman Khan in Pathaan. In The Matrix universe, the term meets its logical conclusion, where Neo offers an olive branch to a literal Deus Ex Machina, the god of the machines.Ergo, it’s not particularly difficult to comprehend why the idea of AGI, or a literal Deus Ex Machina, is particularly disturbing to organised Abrahamic faiths, all of which argue in their own way: thou shalt have no other gods before me.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is the basic operating system of all three major Abrahamic faiths. The same sentiment is repeated in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and there are different words to describe violations of it: idolatry, shirk, apostasy and more. But perhaps the problem goes beyond finding an Abrahamic alternative to God. It lies in creating a form of technology that makes us less human, irrespective of whose altar we worship at, or whether we worship at all.Silicon Valley, our modern-day kingdom of kings, has always had the strangest relationship with theology, claiming to be secular, rational and data-driven while borrowing from the vocabulary of religious texts, where founders convince themselves they are on God’s mission.The messianic streak goes back decades, as the New York Times noted. In the old joke, a programmer asks a computer, “Is there a God?” The computer replies: “There is now.”AI has simply upgraded that old sermon from counterculture slogan to trillion-dollar infrastructure, where those with the keys to the kingdoms of heaven are such stricken creatures. The bros of Big Tech place human lives close to batteries. They continually devalue other human beings. They don’t think twice before firing thousands. They see fellow humans as little more than guinea pigs. And many of them changed their ideology overnight to placate, cajole and even worship the government of the day, as seen in the remarkable alacrity with which Big Tech eschewed wokeness the moment Donald Trump won.Read: Does Sam Altman think of human as batteries? What AGI can we expect from such stricken folks? The problem isn’t a chatbot writing bad poems or a model hallucinating citations, but the Babel instinct, where the world is imagined as a dystopian John Lennon song: one language, one system, one elite, one idea of progress, and the belief that humanity is nothing more than an array of data, performance and predictions. The Vatican, for all its baggage, understands one thing Silicon Valley has conveniently forgotten: false gods always demand sacrifice. And if the Singularity arrives, that promised moment when man and machine merge, we may not want to see the kind of abomination we find on our hands.
There’s an interesting short story that portends what might happen. In Arthur C Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God, monks painstakingly write every name of God, which they believe number nine billion. Writing the names by hand would take them 15,000 years, so they hire two computer geeks who install a machine that can print every name, and do so in 100 days. As the final name is printed, they notice that overhead, without any fuss, the stars start disappearing, signalling the end of the universe. Hopefully, that won’t be mankind’s fate when AGI is born. Go to Source
