The Pope’s Encyclical on AI Made Me Feel Catholic Again: Essay

On a good day, the train ride from Paddington Station to Penzance takes five hours. As it turns out, that’s almost the exact amount of time it takes to read, digest and understand Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter on artificial intelligence.

At 42,300 words, Leo’s opus stretches to 105 pages, with five chapters and 245 paragraphs. It’s basically a novella, pretty much the same length as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s work, which changed perceptions of colonialism and race, emerged in the same decade as perhaps the last epoch-defining papal encyclical. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII ...