Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calls for ethical AI governance, fair wages, worker protections and safeguards against digital exploitation and dehumanization.

📻 Breaking It Down

NAIROBI, Kenya, May 27 — Pope Leo XIV has called for sweeping ethical safeguards and workplace reforms to protect workers from exploitation and dehumanization in the age of artificial intelligence, warning against allowing technology and profit to override human dignity.

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (The Greatness of Humanity), released by the Vatican on Tuesday, the pontiff urged governments, businesses and technology firms to ensure that AI-driven transformation does not reduce workers to “a cost of production” or deepen social inequality.

The 52-page document, published on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s landmark workers’ rights encyclical Rerum Novarum , frames artificial intelligence as one of the defining moral and social challenges of the modern era.

📌 What You Need to Know

Pope Leo XIV warns that the rapid rise of digitalization, robotics and AI is reshaping labour, politics and social relations at an unprecedented pace, requiring urgent ethical oversight and renewed protections for workers.

“Never has humanity had such power over itself,” the Pope states, cautioning that technological systems increasingly influence decision-making, social imagination and economic structures.

Central to the encyclical is a call for a “human-centred economy” where technological innovation must serve the common good rather than corporate domination or unchecked efficiency.

The Pope criticizes what he terms the “Babel syndrome” — an economic and technological culture driven by profit, uniformity and the pursuit of control at the expense of vulnerable people.

Among the major workplace reforms proposed in the document are stronger protections for fair wages, worker participation in decision-making, ethical regulation of automation and safeguards against job insecurity created by AI systems.

The encyclical insists that automation and fragmented digital labour markets should not be judged solely on efficiency or productivity, but on whether they uphold “the dignity of the worker” and ensure families can live dignified lives.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya