I WOULD LIKE to think that I don’t much resemble Joseph Stalin, but I suspect that he shared my urge to scribble on Vatican documents the phrase “You and whose army?”
“It is necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of tech,” the Pope writes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. “States and transnational institutions are called to ensure fair rules and effective safeguards. . . When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own.”
Elsewhere, he writes: “It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users, and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required.”
It is not that I disagree with any of this diagnosis, or even with his prescriptions. He has come out in favour legal bans on children using social media and even smartphones. It is just that his prescriptions seem written for a world with a benevolent and far-sighted international system, which may never have existed, and certainly is not the the world we now live in. The whole 40,000 words of Roman Catholic teaching might well be summarised as “Why J. D. Vance is wrong about everything” — and he is. But he is also in power, and that is the most urgent aspect of the problem.
It is extraordinary that the papacy should appear these days as the heir and guardian of the legacy of 20th-century social democracy. Catholic social teaching, as recapitulated in this encyclical, believes in trade unions, progressive taxation, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1951 Refugee Convention. Is there any other government in the world that does? There are few left that even pay them lip service.
It is odd enough to hear the Pope echoing the kind of left-wing nerds who have been criticising the ad-based internet economy for the past 20 years. “When every action— movements, purchases, relationships and preferences — leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict, and influence behaviour, often without individuals being fully aware of it. If such kinds of data are used to make decisions affecting concrete opportunities — such as access to credit employment or essential services — there is a risk of undermining freedom and discriminating against the most vulnerable.”
This has clearly been written by someone who has been talking with experts and listening to them, too. Unlike so many critiques that concentrate on the effects on the rich world and treat the machines as if they were wholly alien entities, the encyclical takes note of the global South. “Wealthy societies automate rapidly and chaotically, reducing the need for a workforce and creating room for unemployment and institutional friction. Vast regions of the world, by contrast, remain trapped in hybrid economies, where underpaid human labour and partial technologies coexist without achieving genuine transformation. These areas become places of precarious labour, and hotbeds of instability and forced migration.”
It’s difficult to accuse of undue optimism a document so pessimistic about the state of the world, and so clear-sighted about all the ways in which it might get worse. None the less, I think that there are two aspects where the document ignores important dystopian possibilities. It talks about “the interdependence of peace and development”, which might have looked like common sense when Pope Paul VI mentioned it in 1967. But, just as important, as we are seeing in Ukraine today, is the importance of war in technological and even social development. (Incidentally, there is also a line suggesting that no war in today’s world could be just by the traditional criteria).
The technologies of the Ukraine war, uniting drones with AI (Viewpoint, 22 May), are so devastating in part because they are so cheap. Cheap and widespread AIs of limited function are something that the encyclical ignores. Running through it is the quite unexamined assumption that a few hugely rich companies and countries will be needed to develop the kind of AI systems which might threaten us all.
But models not far behind the cutting edge are now available from China, and they will do much of what most users might want. What’s more, they will run on much cheaper hardware, stuff that moderately rich programmers can afford to have in their homes. So, of course, can moderately successful criminal gangs. They should, perhaps, take a place in our nightmares along with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.