Will the age of AI become a new Tower of Babel?

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, signed on 15 May 2026 and formally released on 25 May, Pope Leo XIV poses one of the defining questions of our age: will artificial intelligence help build a more humane social order, or drive us toward a new Babel?

Babel, in Genesis 11, is not simply a story of overreaching ambition. It is also a story about power without humility, grandeur without truth, and collective projects that fracture the very community they claim to elevate. Its lesson is enduring: when human ingenuity is bent toward prestige rather than the common good, confusion follows. For Pope Leo, that biblical image is not a decorative metaphor. It is a warning for the age of AI.

That warning matters because the Church has long intervened at moments of profound economic and social upheaval. Pope Leo is not claiming a technical mandate. He is asserting a moral one: to defend the principle of integral human development, the flourishing of the whole person and of all persons, at a time when technological change is rapidly outpacing ethical reflection and public oversight.

His concern is easy to understand. Much of the infrastructure, data and computing power behind AI is concentrated in the hands of a small number of private actors. Driven by scale, competition and profit, they often move far faster than public regulation. Profit can spur innovation and social benefit. But when a technology this consequential is shaped primarily by narrow commercial incentives, the risks become plain: opacity, exclusion and the weakening of democratic oversight.

Hence the encyclical’s insistence on accountability. Pope Leo calls on developers, investors and public authorities to reckon with their responsibility at every stage of AI’s design and deployment. These systems do not feel, empathize or exercise moral judgment; they operate through data, pattern recognition and statistical inference. For all their astonishing capabilities, they are not human. And that is precisely why, without prudence and restraint, they can produce harmful and unforeseen outcomes at scale.

Accountability, in this sense, is not a slogan. It means making black-box systems more intelligible, testing them rigorously for risk, and asking hard questions about how algorithms are built, what data they are trained on, and whose values they encode. Will they widen access and opportunity, or entrench existing bias and discrimination? Will they deepen the divide between those who own the tools and those who are governed by them? These questions are especially urgent when most frontier systems are being developed in a handful of powerful centers in North America, Europe and China.

The Pope’s appeal, however, is not directed only at technologists. It is addressed to citizens as well. Accountability is ultimately collective. It requires the civic resolve to demand that political institutions act for the common good rather than surrender public judgment to technological inevitability or private power.

That is why the encyclical speaks so directly to the role of government. The state has a duty to make life more bearable for all citizens and to establish laws and policies that resist exclusion, manipulation and marginalization. Pope Leo is therefore right to insist that governments act with seriousness—through law, oversight and public guidance—so that AI strengthens rather than corrodes social trust.

He also widens the frame by reminding us that AI is not environmentally neutral. The data centers and computing systems that sustain it consume vast amounts of energy and water. In places such as Africa, where many still lack reliable electricity, the expansion of digital infrastructure raises an unavoidable question: how should states balance the energy demands of households, schools, hospitals and industry against the rising resource needs of AI? That challenge belongs not only to national governments but also to international institutions and development partners.

The encyclical’s central message is therefore both simple and profound: we should not be dazzled by the apparent intelligence of algorithms. However sophisticated their computations, they do not embody human values, judgment or lived experience. To over-trust them, without firm regulation and serious oversight, is to risk deepening some of the world’s gravest injustices—inequality, categorization, dependency and marginalization. That would betray the very purpose of technology, which should enlarge human freedom, not diminish it.

There is still time to avoid a new Tower of Babel: a world fractured by tools powerful enough to transform society, yet governed too weakly to serve humanity. That is why Pope Leo’s question deserves to be heard well beyond the Church. It is, in the end, a political, moral and civilizational question for us all.

Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah is an expert in development and socio-economic transformation, with a focus on Africa.

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