Dear Magicians,

Let’s talk about a 45,000-word document that just dropped. Most people will never read it. Even I, a former Catholic Altar Boy, must confess: I couldn’t read it all the way through. Luckily, Claude Opus (Dei) 4.8 was there for me. I should note that OpenAi is led by Sam Alt-man, and Anthopic is led by Dario Amo-dei (literally “lover of God”).

Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope, for those keeping score — dropped his inaugural encyclical. It’s called “Magnifica Humanitas.” Roughly translated: “Humanity Is Magnificent”… the subtext Stop Letting Robots Replace Us!

As someone who loves AI more than he loves his neighbors, I felt like I was back at the Church of Saint John and Saint Mary 40 years ago — caught napping during the sermon and then snapped to attention when I was personally addressed.

The leader of 1.4 billion Catholics just wrote a document longer than most PhD dissertations about artificial intelligence, human dignity, and whether we’re building the Tower of Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem. And honestly? He makes some points that would survive peer review.

The Pope draws a striking parallel between two biblical construction projects. Babel: one language, one technology, one direction — impressive but dehumanizing. Meant to fight against God in order to make a name for itself. No need for God’s mountains when you can ascend to the heavens to make war on God thanks to your composite building materials, lithography, and common language and purpose. Example 2: Jerusalem under Nehemiah: messy, collaborative, prayerful, rebuilt brick by brick by ordinary people. His question to us: which one are we building with AI?

I build telescopes for a living. I’ve spent decades trying to detect signals from the beginning of time. So when the Pope writes that AI systems “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,” I want to raise my hand and say: Your Holiness, I’ve got faculty colleagues who fit that description while grading during finals week.

But he’s right.

He points out that the real power over AI doesn’t rest with governments anymore. It rests with private companies whose resources “surpass those of many Governments.” When a handful of corporations effectively decide what’s visible, what’s true, and who gets access, we’ve got a subsidiarity problem that would make Pius XI spin in his papal apartments.

The document warns against both naive enthusiasm and unfounded fear. It’s neither techno-utopian nor Luddite. It’s something rarer: measured. The Pope actually uses the phrase “disarm AI” — not meaning destroy it, but free it from the arms race mentality of whoever builds the biggest model wins.

Sidebar: This week I interviewed the man who’s issued the clearest warnings about AI Safety — even coining the term itself — Roman Yampolskiy. That interview won’t air for a few weeks so until it does, watch here to learn his thoughts about the Safety of AI: what magnificence do they have and what rights and dignity does AI deserve?

Back to the Vatican: as someone who races to publish papers before competitors scoop me, I feel seen. And convicted. Here’s what surprised me most.

The Pope apologizes. Formally. For the Church’s historical complicity in slavery, acknowledging it took eighteen centuries to fully condemn what should have been obvious from the start. Then he connects this directly to AI: if we don’t want to apologize again in fifty years for what we’re building now, we need to act today.

That’s not just theology. That’s good science. Learn from your errors. Update your priors. Don’t repeat the experiment that already failed.

The document isn’t perfect. At 45,000 words, it could use an editor. Or the Shortform algorithm. But its central message lands with force: technology that makes us more efficient but less human isn’t progress. It’s our generation’s Tower of Babel.

And recall how that story ends:

Test your assumptions about what you’re building.

Because whether you’re Catholic, atheist, or somewhere in between, the question remains: Are we using AI to rebuild Jerusalem together, or are we just stacking bricks toward a heaven we’ll never reach?

By the way I spoke to Peter Diamandis, who admitted AI accelerators may be ushering in a new secular religion. See “Conversation” below.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian