Barbarism With Better Software: Pope Leo Warns of the AI Future

Joshua Scheer, May 26, 2026 , https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/26/barbarism-with-better-software-pope-leo-warns-of-the-ai-future/

Pope Leo XIV is warning that artificial intelligence, if left in the hands of profit-hungry corporations and unaccountable tech oligarchs, could unleash a “social calamity” by replacing human work. And now even the markets are beginning to price in the fear. Prediction traders on Kalshi see a 60% chance that U.S. unemployment crosses 8% before 2030, while also betting that AI may already be the leading cause of job cuts this month.

With the Pope writing “Work remains a fundamental dimension of the human experience, for not only is it a means of sustenance, but it is also a context for expression, relationships and contributing to the community,” … A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment.”

Tolkien, Gandalf and the Fight Over Humanity in the Age of AI

In one of the encyclical’s most striking moments, Pope Leo invokes the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien while calling for humanity to “disarm” artificial intelligence and resist technological domination. Without directly naming Gandalf, Leo references a passage from one of Tolkien’s novels that reflects a central moral theme running through The Lord of the Rings: ordinary people confronting immense forces of power and corruption not by controlling the world, but by defending what is human within it.The passage speaks to the responsibility of people to care for “the fields that we know,” preserving a livable future for those who come after us rather than seeking mastery over all things.

The reference is notable not only because it is believed to be the first major incorporation of Tolkien into a high-level Vatican doctrinal document, but because it reveals the philosophical core of Leo’s warning about AI. Like Tolkien, the Pope appears deeply concerned with the dehumanizing effects of technological power when detached from morality, community and human dignity.

Rather than treating technology as destiny, Leo frames the struggle over AI as a profoundly human and ethical question: whether society will allow machines, corporations and systems of profit to dominate human life — or whether people can still reclaim technology for the common good.

What is striking is not that the Vatican is sounding the alarm. It is that Wall Street, usually eager to celebrate every job-killing “innovation” as efficiency, appears to share the anxiety. The same financial class that cheers automation when it boosts margins is now wagering on the social wreckage it may leave behind.

Pope Leo XIV vs. the AI Oligarchy

Leo’s warning cuts directly through Silicon Valley’s favorite lie: that technology is automatically progress. Work, he argues, is not merely a paycheck. It is dignity, community, purpose and participation in society. A world where machines enrich the few while millions are pushed into “forced inactivity” is not advanced. It is barbarism with better software.

The AI revolution is being sold as liberation. But without democratic control, labor protections and a moral economy, it risks becoming the most sophisticated union-busting machine ever built — a system that turns human beings into obsolete costs while calling the wreckage innovation.

The high priests of the digital economy are beginning to admit what workers have feared for years: artificial intelligence is not simply another technological innovation. It is a mechanism for social restructuring on a scale capable of hollowing out entire societies while concentrating unprecedented power into the hands of a tiny technological elite.

Now, in an extraordinary moment that reveals just how deep the anxiety has become, Pope Leo XIV has entered the fight.

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Leo issued a direct moral indictment of the AI economy now being constructed by Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He warned that mass unemployment caused by automation could produce “social calamity,” condemning an economic order that treats human beings as disposable inputs in the pursuit of profit.

“The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs,” Leo wrote, arguing that the human person “is an end, not a means.”

The remarkable thing is not simply that the Pope is saying this. It is that the financial markets appear to agree.

On prediction platform Kalshi, traders now place a 60% chance that U.S. unemployment rises above 8% before 2030, with nearly even odds it surpasses 9%. Those are recession-level numbers — the kind associated historically with economic collapse, mass foreclosures and social instability. Yet this time the fear is not merely financial panic. It is technological displacement.

The same corporate class that spent the last decade promising AI would “augment” workers is now openly discussing which sectors can be eliminated first.

Customer service. Journalism. Translation. Design. Coding. Accounting. Legal research. Teaching assistance. Medical diagnostics. Administrative work. Truck driving. Retail logistics. The language has become chillingly clinical: “labor optimization,” “efficiency gains,” “redundancy reduction.” Human lives reduced to balance-sheet obstacles.

Silicon Valley presents this process as inevitable — a law of nature rather than a political choice. But Leo’s encyclical rejects that mythology outright. Technology, he argues, is not neutral when it is controlled by systems organized around extraction and domination.

The Pope’s critique goes far beyond unemployment statistics. He warns that AI is creating a new form of digital colonialism in which data itself becomes the raw material of empire. Entire populations, he writes, are being transformed into “rare earths of power” — mined not for minerals but for behavioral information, biometric profiles, consumption patterns and predictive intelligence.

A handful of corporations now possess more behavioral information about humanity than any government in history. They monitor speech, movement, emotion, consumption and political behavior at planetary scale. AI supercharges that power by transforming raw data into predictive control systems — systems capable not merely of understanding populations, but manipulating them.

And as wealth concentrates upward, the social contract below begins to collapse.

Leo warns that a society where only a small fraction of people maintain meaningful employment — despite immense technological abundance — risks “human and cultural impoverishment.” Work, he insists, is not simply economic survival. It is participation in human life itself: purpose, responsibility, relationships and community.

This is precisely what Silicon Valley’s utopian rhetoric ignores.

For decades, tech billionaires promised automation would liberate humanity from drudgery. Instead, millions find themselves trapped in algorithmic management systems, precarious gig work, surveillance workplaces and endless digital dependency. Productivity exploded while wages stagnated. Corporate profits soared while social bonds disintegrated.

AI threatens to accelerate this process to catastrophic speed.

Even some within the industry appear unnerved by what they are building. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, appearing beside Pope Leo at the Vatican, admitted there is “a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale.” He acknowledged that no mechanism currently exists to distribute the gains globally or prevent mass social devastation.

That admission alone should shatter the fantasy that the architects of AI possess a coherent plan for humanity’s future.

Because the truth is increasingly obvious: the market has no moral framework for handling technological power of this magnitude.

Capital rewards efficiency, not justice.
Profit, not dignity.
Extraction, not community.

If replacing millions of workers with algorithms increases shareholder returns, the system treats that outcome as success — regardless of the social consequences. Entire regions can collapse into unemployment while stock valuations soar.

This is why Leo’s intervention matters.

He is not merely criticizing technology. He is challenging the economic religion surrounding it.

The modern AI boom rests on an almost theological belief that technological progress is inherently good, that innovation justifies itself, and that those who question the social costs are irrational enemies of the future. Silicon Valley speaks of AI in messianic terms: salvation through computation, transcendence through automation, immortality through machines.

But Leo offers a radically different vision. Human beings are not inefficient machines to be optimized away. Society cannot survive if millions are stripped not only of income, but of meaning and social participation itself.

The danger is not simply that AI becomes powerful.

The danger is that it becomes powerful inside an economic system already defined by staggering inequality, democratic decay and corporate domination.

Under those conditions, automation does not liberate workers.
It liberates corporations from workers.

And unless democratic control over technology emerges soon, the future now being constructed may look less like liberation than a technologically sophisticated form of mass abandonment — a world where unprecedented wealth and productivity coexist beside social despair, permanent unemployment and the slow erosion of human dignity itself.

You can read Leo’s words here:

ENCYCLICAL LETTER
MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS
OF HIS HOLINESS
POPE LEO XIV
ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON
IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE