Pope Leo’s AI encyclical reveals global unease as unchecked tech monopolies exploit labor, data, and life itself
Original framing: “Americans echo Pope Leo’s concerns about AI: ‘It threatens workers, privacy and human life’” — The Guardian - Technology
Gig workers in Kenya and India, whose labor fuels AI training datasets, report algorithmic wage theft and dehumanizing performance metrics—yet their struggles are rarely centered in mainstream AI discourse. Black and Indigenous scholars like Joy Buolamwini and Safiya Noble have documented how AI systems reproduce racist and colonial biases, yet their work is often dismissed as 'activist' rather than foundational to the field. The *Algorithmic Justice League* and *Data 4 Black Lives* highlight how marginalized communities are not just victims but agents of resistance, designing alternative AI systems rooted in justice.
The pope’s encyclical, while framed as a moral warning, inadvertently reveals the contradictions of a system where 'ethics' is a luxury good for the Global North while the Global South bears the brunt of AI’s extractive logic—mirroring the Catholic Church’s own history of colonial complicity.
The real threat is not AI itself but the unchecked power of tech oligarchs, venture capital, and surveillance states who deploy it to deepen inequality, a pattern repeated across centuries of enclosure and exploitation. Indigenous resistance, worker organizing, and decolonial AI initiatives offer not just critiques but tangible alternatives, from data sovereignty to participatory governance. The trickster’s laughter—whether Hermes’ or Bakhtin’s—exposes the absurdity of claiming control over systems that are, by design, uncontrollable. The path forward requires dismantling the myth of AI as a neutral tool and replacing it with a politics of relational accountability, where technology serves life rather than capital. This demands a coalition of marginalized voices, ethical scientists, and radical artists to reimagine AI as a communal resource, not a commodity.