Economist Daron Acemoglu responds to Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, which characterized AI development as a threat to human dignity. Acemoglu argues that while the Pope’s critique is welcome, it does not go far enough in questioning what AI systems are actually designed to accomplish. He contends that public discourse on AI focuses too narrowly on competition between labs and technical capability, rather than on whether current institutions can direct the technology toward broadly shared human benefit.
