Pope warns of AI risks in major church document

The Vatican just dropped a massive statement on AI. Pope Leo XIV spent months working on this encyclical, and he wasn't holding back about what he sees as serious problems with how we're building and deploying these systems without enough thought about the human cost.

So what's he actually worried about? Job displacement, the concentration of power in a few tech companies, and how these systems can perpetuate bias and inequality at scale. He's not saying AI itself is evil or that we should stop developing it, but he's pointing out that the people building this stuff need to think harder about ethics and responsibility. The church is basically saying: slow down, consider the consequences, involve more voices in these decisions.

The document hits different because it's coming from an institution that actually has weight in global conversations. Governments and companies ignore their own ethics boards all the time, but when the Pope puts 43,000 words into something, people listen. Whether anything actually changes is another question, but at least someone with a platform is naming problems that most of the tech industry still treats as someone else's responsibility.