After Pope Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas, Catholic Universities Should Have Human Intelligence Research Lab Magnifica Humanitas

By David Stephen

There is a recent report on The Verge, The Pope isn't AGI-pilled, stating that, "On Monday, Pope Leo XIV unveiled an encyclical letter addressing the societal implications of artificial intelligence. The letter, titled Magnifica Humanitas, warned that the "use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people's lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom." Alongside him was Anthropic cofounder and interpretability team lead Christopher Olah, representing a partnership between the Catholic Church and one of the biggest players in AI."

"The decision to partner with the Vatican was a strategic move by Anthropic, a company that's built its business on a carefully curated reputation of being a more trustworthy alternative than its competitors. Anthropic famously spent the last few months embroiled in a battle with the Pentagon over limits to military AI use, and a connection with another powerful institution could help bolster its status — and let it help shape future Vatican recommendations."

"In the encyclical, the pope compared AI to the Tower of Babel, a structure he describes as "supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.". The world must "avoid the 'Babel syndrome,'" he wrote: "the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance." In his reckoning, AI became not just a new technology, but a Biblical struggle. "The risk of dehumanization," he wrote, "is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise." The weight of those statements, not the technical specifics, is likely to be its lasting impact."

Human Intelligence

The first thing to care about, for humanity, in the era of artificial intelligence is human intelligence. Nothing is more important, even if artificial intelligence is 100% safe.

Humanity is at a stage in civilization where the needs for productivity are the needs [mostly] for intelligence. If intelligence is supplied, productive tasks can be completed. This means that as much as artificial intelligence can do, in any given task, if it is good enough, consistent enough and affordable enough, it can stand-in for human intelligence.

As artificial intelligence gets better, and human intelligence stays [say] static, there could be more displacement, or at minimum more competition — with machines.

Already, among humans, with rising population and possibilities with learning, competition for opportunities are ferocious. It takes much more to get less than what was possible, for the same amount of knowledge, in the past.

Now, machines have joined the race. The immediate enemies may appear to be corporations, profit, capitalism or whatever, but the ultimate enemy is actually the opacity of what human intelligence is, in the brain?

What exactly is human intelligence? What are the types? How does it work? How can it be improved for problem-solving? What are the clear advantages over artificial intelligence, to map possibilities for competitiveness? What are the prospects of advancement for artificial intelligence and how can human intelligence be prepared against that?

These questions are important because the vacuum with human intelligence is a risk in the AI era, where it is not just useful to blame AI as a blanket, but to ask the real question, and focus on the mind.

For example, there were several eras of illegal drug trends across the world, opium, quaalude and so forth. Some of those were phased out or reduced, yet, addictions persisted. Till date, there is still no major model in neuroscience on addiction, how it works, what it is and so forth, that can be displayed to drive willpower.

This should not be the case with human intelligence. Even with all that was compla