I’ve been reading Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), this summer, and I keep putting it down mid-page to just stare out the window. That doesn’t happen to me often with a 150-page church document. But as a neuroscientist who spends her days at the intersection of decision science, digital health, and AI, I wasn’t prepared for how much of it would land, not just as theology, but as science. Yes, you read that right: as science.
“To Be Optimized”: Three Words That Should Stop Us Cold
The encyclical was signed on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and formally released on May 25 at the Vatican’s Synod Hall. Pope Leo XIV presented it himself, which is unusual; most popes hand that job to a cardinal. It takes on one of the defining questions of our moment: how do we hold onto human dignity while artificial intelligence reshapes nearly everything around us?
He’s not out to condemn AI, and he says so plainly. Technology, he writes, “is not a force antagonistic to humanity,” nor is it “inherently evil.” It can “heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home.”
But he names something else, a quieter danger, one I think every clinician, scientist, technologist, and policymaker reading this should sit with: the risk that we start seeing ourselves and each other as projects “to be optimized.”
These three words should stop all of us cold.
Here’s why: In decision neuroscience, we’ve known for a while that how we frame a decision changes the outcome. The story we tell about our own identity shapes the choices that follow it. So if we start to think of ourselves primarily as systems to fine-tune and upgrade, that’s not just a turn of phrase. It’s a different lens for judging risk, vulnerability, and, ultimately, the worth of a human life.
What Neuroscience Actually Knows About Vulnerability
Pope Leo XIV writes, with real clarity, that our limitations including illness, aging, suffering, and overall vulnerability aren’t defects waiting for a fix. His claim is that we flourish through those limits, not despite them. In those moments, he writes, we may “discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others, and encounter the presence of the Lord.”
That tracks with what the science shows. Some of the most compelling research in decision neuroscience finds that it’s precisely the experience of vulnerability, uncertainty, and constraint that activates our deepest capacities for empathy, moral reasoning, and authentic choice.
A 2024 experiment using event-related brain potentials found that people consistently helped others more when their empathic concern had been engaged, whether the situation involved a potential gain or a potential loss. In other words, vulnerability reliably pulls prosocial behavior out of us. And the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain we lean on for judgment and planning, doesn’t do its best work in a frictionless, optimized environment. A 2023 review of lesion studies on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex found that this region seems to construct social and economic value using much of the same machinery, which is a fancy way of saying our brains don’t cleanly separate “rational” choices from relational ones. Judgment doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens embedded in relationship, in context, in the messiness of a life actually being lived.
So, when we let an algorithm pre-decide, pre-filter, or pre-recommend on our behalf, we’re not necessarily freeing up human judgment. We might just be letting it atrophy, quietly, one convenient shortcut at a time.
The Tower of Babel, Revisited for the Age of AI
The Tower of Babel, Revisited for the Age of AI
The whole encyclical is built around two biblical images, and I find both useful although as a scientist, I don’t typically read encyclicals with the objective of looking for data.
The first is the Tower of Babel which is portrayed as a project of self-assertion, uniformity, and control. In our current world context, this is a civilization willing to trade human dignity for efficiency, reaching for transcendence on the strength of its own technological power alone.
The second image is that of Nehemiah, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, which is prayerful, communal, shared out in responsibility, ordered toward connection instead of domination.
We’re standing at that fork right now, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I watch both tendencies play out every week in digital health. Some AI tools genuinely extend what people can do, restore independence, take weight off caregivers. Others quietly replace human judgment, flatten complicated patients into data profiles, and make calls that, as the Pope puts it, “no computational system, however sophisticated, can make wisely” the decisions that need “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change.”
Reading Magnifica Humanitas Like a Decision Neuroscientist
What strikes me most, reading this through the lens of my own field, is how well Pope Leo XIV understands the architecture of human choice better, honestly, than a lot of the tech roadmaps I’ve read.
When he warns that “efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value,” he’s describing something we call surrogate endpoint bias in clinical research: swapping in a measurable stand-in for the real outcome we actually care about, because the stand-in is easier to track. We do this constantly. We optimize for speed, for throughput, for engagement. But human flourishing was never a metric, and it resists being turned into one.
When he insists AI has to stay ordered toward “openness and communion,” he’s putting words to something behavioural science backs up: the decisions we look back on with a sense of integrity are almost always made in relationship and in community, with other people genuinely in view, not just as data points.
And his four practical questions for evaluating AI in daily life are some of the clearest decision-quality criteria I’ve come across in any literature:
- Does it help me remain faithful to the truth?
- Does it help me educate myself and others?
- Does it help me cultivate genuine closeness in relationships?
- Does it help me participate in the promotion of justice and peace?
They ask us to look past what’s immediate and convenient, toward the consequences that actually matter down the line.
The Magnificent Humanity I See in My Work
In my work with patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, I’ve watched something happen that no algorithm has managed to replicate yet. It’s the moment a person sitting across from a physician, or holding a family member’s hand, or hearing a diagnosis for the first time, makes a decision that isn’t optimal by any computational measure but is, unmistakably, human.
It’s choosing the harder treatment because a grandchild is due in the spring. It’s stopping aggressive intervention because what matters most now is getting home, and doing the hard, tender relationship work that’s still left to do. It’s telling family members about a genetic risk, not because an algorithm flagged it, but because love asks it of you.
No machine builds a heart that gives itself away. Pope Leo XIV is right about that. This is not a matter of this being a limitation of AI so much as a definition of what it means to be human.
What This Means for Us Now
Magnifica Humanitas isn’t a call to reject AI, and the Pope is careful to say so directly. It’s an urgent, carefully argued call to point AI toward the dignity of the human person and the common good, rather than away from it.
For those of us working at the frontier of digital health, decision science, and AI, I’d put this encyclical on the required-reading list. It names a risk our own fields have sometimes been reluctant to name out loud. And it holds us to a standard that decision research already supports, even without the theology, though the theology, here, is what gives it its weight.
He leaves us with a question I expect to be sitting with for a long time, whether you’re Catholic, another kind of Christian, or simply a person of goodwill:
Are we building the city where God and humanity dwell together? Or are we building another Tower of Babel?
In my own work, in the tools I endorse, in the conversations I have with patients and innovators, I plan to keep asking that question. Because making genuinely smarter decisions, not just faster ones, has never mattered more.
How about you? Where do you notice that fork in the road showing up in your own life and work right now?