How I learned to Fear AI

The proliferating forms and functions of artificial intelligence have loosened many lips. Across the theoretical and the political spectrum, initial reactions ranged from despair to anticipatory obedience to the holy rage of Sam Kriss.¹ Some common themes, though, have begun to emerge. It is surprising and heartening how many people have expressed, in ways small and large, an uneasy sense that things are changing according to rules they do not understand for the benefit of corporations and governments whose motives and whose methods grow more opaque by the day.

There are people—and then there’s the pope. When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread.