This was bound to happen. The most significant, if not the most influential, voice in the Christian world has spoken on AI and the word he chose was strong. Disarm!
The Pope’s intervention on artificial intelligence is not a theological footnote in all conversations happening around AI the world over. It actually signifies that the debate over AI has moved beyond corporate boardrooms and computer science faculty into the realm of human dignity and consciousness.
Other faiths are raising similar concerns. In a recent Faith-AI Covenant convened with OpenAI and Anthropic, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian and Baha’i leaders gathered to discuss how AI can be developed in line with human values and moral responsibility, with the core argument being that regulation alone cannot keep pace with AI and that faith communities must help guide its moral use.
In Islam, leading institutions like Al-Azhar have been categorical that AI cannot issue binding fatwas due to the lack of the deep scholarly knowledge required for religious interpretation, with the Grand Imam stressing the ethical use of AI. While Big tech increasingly frames AI as a productivity revolution, faith leaders and are increasingly framing it as a test of what it means to be human.
The backdrop of the Pope’s first encyclical, titled ‘Magnifica Humanitas’, could not have come at a more charged time. Meta fired more than 8000 employees, some at off-hours like 4am (across different time zones) in May. Similar layoffs have been reported in big tech around the world. Ironically, AI bills are now surpassing the costs of employing humans in organisations, but that is another discussion for another time.
Across American states, graduation speakers talking about AI are being booed by young graduates, a generation signalling its distrust of the world being handed to them. An active resistance will take time to organise, but the question of whether AI is making humans redundant – or as the Pope put it, stripping them of dignity – is fast becoming the defining issue of this decade.
In the US, California has become the first state in the US to respond with a concrete policy. In May, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind executive order directing state agencies, labour experts, economists, universities and industry leaders to develop new policies and gather data on workforce disruption caused by AI while framing a promise that workers share in the wealth generated by the big tech companies. Europe already has the EU AI Act, the first horizontal legal framework for AI technologies, but the complexity of implementation and the rapidly evolving technology pose challenges.
The anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence is not without precedent. When the steam engine roared to life in 18th-century Britain, it triggered waves of fear among textile workers who saw their livelihoods threatened by machinery. The Luddite movement of the early 1800s was not, as popular myth suggests, simply anti-technology; rather, it was an organised resistance by skilled craftsmen who understood that industrialisation could strip them of economic power and social standing.
Similarly, the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century displaced an entire class of scribes and manuscript copyists. Yet in both cases, new categories of work eventually emerged, economies expanded and human labour found new expression.
However, what makes the AI moment feel categorically different is the speed and the scope. Previous technological revolutions took decades to ripple through societies, giving institutions, governments and workers some time to adapt. AI is compressing that timeline into years, even months.
Critically, past technologies automated physical labour by replacing hands and backs. AI threatens to automate cognitive labour – the writing, analysis, judgement and creativity that knowledge workers believed placed them beyond the reach of machines. This is why the Pope’s intervention carries weight. When technology begins to threaten not just livelihoods but human purpose and dignity, it moves from being an economic question to a deeply moral one.
Also, the AI ethics debate across the world is now moving beyond just job losses and anxiety. The question of whether AI systems might possess some form of consciousness has moved from science fiction to serious academic debate. Scientists are now warning that rapid advances in AI and neurotechnology are outpacing our understanding of consciousness itself, creating serious ethical risks.
At the University of Cambridge, Tom McClelland has argued that our evidence for what constitutes consciousness is far too limited to determine if or when AI has made that leap and that a reliable test for doing so will remain out of reach for the foreseeable future. His position is noteworthy because he argues that there is no reliable way to know whether an AI system is truly conscious, and that uncertainty may persist indefinitely.
Meanwhile, prominent figures, including Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, who have done pioneering work on deep learning, now warn that AI systems may soon possess feelings or require serious legal and other considerations, adding to the philosophical puzzle.
A key distinction emerging in academic literature is between access consciousness, the functional processing of information, and phenomenal consciousness, which involves genuine subjective experience. If AI systems cross that second threshold, the moral and social implications are enormous, touching labour rights, legal personhood and the very definition of exploitation. Scholars are now seriously asking whether we are approaching a new constituency of non-biological ethical beings, AI agents that either have rights of their own or carry moral duties
While we continue to advance AI innovation and AI skilling, both globally and within Pakistan, as drivers of economic growth, it is equally important that we remain mindful of the broader ethical boundaries governing its use. Most critically, users must be informed of these boundaries so that AI is adopted efficiently and responsibly, rather than recklessly.
The writer is a strategic comms, inclusion/digital policy advisor and teaches internet governance and tech policy at LUMS.
