Why the Pope's AI Encyclical Gets the State Wrong

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas warns that large private platforms threaten human dignity through data collection and algorithmic control. It calls for public authorities to regulate. That move ignores a historical pattern: states, not markets, have been the greatest opponents of individual freedoms.

Markets disperse power. States concentrate it. Concentrating power is the threat. The encyclical assumes the legislator is exempt from human fallibility. That assumption is the blind spot. True humility would accept that all humans are fallible, including regulators. Centralized regulation then merely shifts the problem. It makes the concentration of power legal and permanent, backed by the full coercive force of the state.

The encyclical itself provides the correct framework: subsidiarity. It calls for the humanization of technology by individuals, communities, and intermediary bodies. The text says social institutions must respect and support individual responsibility, and that higher-level authorities should not supplant lower-level ones. This principle disperses power rather than centralizes it. It implies a world where thousands of actors develop, use, and shape AI without any single entity holding a monopoly on its use.