The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has been out for a few days. The image being received most readily as reassurance is from the presentation: an AI founder standing beside the Pope, saying that people outside need to remind those inside of the humanity they cannot see. The sentiment has been received as noble.
The founders of the major AI companies are warning publicly about the dangers of what they are building. The warnings are not vague. Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the architects of modern AI, assigns a 20 percent probability to catastrophe. Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and the field’s most cited voice on existential risk, has suggested it might be sensible to stop altogether. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote before founding the company that this might be the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence. These are not hedged statements from cautious men. They are alarms pulled by the people who built the building.
And yet the proposed responses are almost entirely technical: better alignment, stronger safety protocols, governance frameworks, etc. The logic of the solution is the logic of the problem. What these companies mean by “ethics” is not the question of what this work does to the person performing it, or what it will do to the persons it reaches. It is another line of code.
A Spanish expression names what I think is actually on display in that image, though I have not found a satisfying English equivalent. The expression is dejación de deberes. It does not mean negligence, which implies a failure to notice. It does not mean error, which implies a good-faith attempt that went wrong. It names the relinquishing of one’s duty, of what one is expected to carry.
The founders know the stakes: they are the ones who published the warnings. The knowledge is not missing. Sincerity of alarm does not discharge the duty it names.
What is missing is the willingness to let that knowledge be constitutive: to make the question of the human person not a downstream ethical consideration but the premise from which the work begins.
Outsourcing that question to encyclicals and ethics boards while development accelerates is not collaboration. It is the appearance of responsibility in place of its exercise. Hiring philosophers does not resolve this. The question is not whether there are philosophers in the building. It is whether the anthropology carries the freight.
The technology being built operates by producing outputs statistically indistinguishable from understanding, without understanding. It is trained on the full recorded output of human thought while having none of its own. The output comes across as being from a person; the system is not a person.
The technology denies interiority by construction. The people building it deny it by choice.
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painting: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.