After Pope Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas, Catholic Universities Should Have Human Intelligence Research Lab

By David Stephen

There is a recent report on The Verge, The Pope isn’t AGI-pilled, stating that, “On Monday, Pope Leo XIV unveiled an encyclical letter addressing the societal implications of artificial intelligence. The letter, titled Magnifica Humanitas, warned that the “use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom.” Alongside him was Anthropic cofounder and interpretability team lead Christopher Olah, representing a partnership between the Catholic Church and one of the biggest players in AI.”

“The decision to partner with the Vatican was a strategic move by Anthropic, a company that’s built its business on a carefully curated reputation of being a more trustworthy alternative than its competitors. Anthropic famously spent the last few months embroiled in a battle with the Pentagon over limits to military AI use, and a connection with another powerful institution could help bolster its status — and let it help shape future Vatican recommendations.”

Magnifica Humanitas

“In the encyclical, the pope compared AI to the Tower of Babel, a structure he describes as “supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.”. The world must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” he wrote: “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.” In his reckoning, AI became not just a new technology, but a Biblical struggle. “The risk of dehumanization,” he wrote, “is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.” The weight of those statements, not the technical specifics, is likely to be its lasting impact.”

Human Intelligence

The first thing to care about, for humanity, in the era of artificial intelligence is human intelligence. Nothing is more important, even if artificial intelligence is 100% safe.

Humanity is at a stage in civilization where the needs for productivity are the needs [mostly] for intelligence. If intelligence is supplied, productive tasks can be completed. This means that as much as artificial intelligence can do, in any given task, if it is good enough, consistent enough and affordable enough, it can stand-in for human intelligence.

As artificial intelligence gets better, and human intelligence stays [say] static, there could be more displacement, or at minimum more competition — with machines.

Already, among humans, with rising population and possibilities with learning, competition for opportunities are ferocious. It takes much more to get less than what was possible, for the same amount of knowledge, in the past.

Now, machines have joined the race. The immediate enemies may appear to be corporations, profit, capitalism or whatever, but the ultimate enemy is actually the opacity of what human intelligence is, in the brain?

What exactly is human intelligence? What are the types? How does it work? How can it be improved for problem-solving? What are the clear advantages over artificial intelligence, to map possibilities for competitiveness? What are the prospects of advancement for artificial intelligence and how can human intelligence be prepared against that?

These questions are important because the vacuum with human intelligence is a risk in the AI era, where it is not just useful to blame AI as a blanket, but to ask the real question, and focus on the mind.

For example, there were several eras of illegal drug trends across the world, opium, quaalude and so forth. Some of those were phased out or reduced, yet, addictions persisted. Till date, there is still no major model in neuroscience on addiction, how it works, what it is and so forth, that can be displayed to drive willpower.

This should not be the case with human intelligence. Even with all that was complained about with social media, and so forth, while there are issues with it, it is still possible to ask why human intelligence or the human mind was vulnerable to it — if the objective is to solve the problem from the mind-side.

This is the priority for now. What is human intelligence and how does it work as a counterweight to artificial intelligence?

Human Intelligence Research Lab

There is no human intelligence research lab anywhere on earth. There is no lab, whose direct mission, focus, purpose is to define, place and understand human intelligence in the brain, even conceptually, to produce, at minimum, a display to explain what exactly it is and how it can be competitive against AI.

No university has it, no startup, no venture capital has supported anything about it and so forth.

What any Catholic University anywhere on earth should be thinking now is to setup a human intelligence research lab, immediately. The purpose is to make it an ambitious work to prepare humanity for whatever is ahead.

It should already be clear that in the race to artificial general intelligence, appeal won’t cut it, rationality won’t, plea, sympathy, equality or whatever would not cut it. If AGI is good, it will be used for more work and social objectives.

Those who have it will be more powerful, wealthier and threats from those who don’t may allow them make decisions that may not be favorable.

This means that while there are discussions on AI safety, alignment or even the dignity of humanity, nothing holds a better hope than to have what it takes to face artificial intelligence.

This is what Catholic Universities should be doing now, and pushing to the maximum possible extent. Humanity will not win AI because of emotions. Even though emotions too are yet to be clearly defined by neuroscience.

Pope Leo XIV means well and the Catholic Church is taking a stand. Whatever reality holds has human intelligence at the center.

This means that Anthropic is a hostile corporation to human intelligence. Anthropic does not have a human intelligence research lab. They have not done any work to shape how it is understood and so forth. They are focused, in part, on AI consciousness — which positive or negative — does not shape if human intelligence improves or not.

The first to do human intelligence research lab, will be the most important preparedness step against the risks of artificial intelligence. The effort can be based on the postulation in Conceptual Biomarkers and Theoretical Biological Factors for Psychiatric and Intelligence Nosology.

There is a recent [May 30, 2026] analysis in The Guardian, Anthropic’s alliance with pope on AI harms: all in good faith or ‘Vatican-washing?’, stating that, “Why did Anthropic’s founder sit beside the pope during a warning about AI?”

“In the first major written teaching of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV took artificial intelligence to task. The pontiff delineated the technology’s most concerning threats to humanity: replacing workers, accelerating war and exploiting the environment. At a ceremony honoring the holy teaching the day of its release at the Vatican, the pope was flanked by an unusual guest speaker: Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, one of the people behind the AI boom so worrying Leo.”

“Olah’s presence raises a key question: how could the Catholic church and the world’s most valuable AI startup work together, when Anthropic’s technology may bring about the future Leo is warning against?”

“All of these companies are building technology that … is designed to replace people,” Furlong says. “That’s very much at odds with the pope’s words. You can’t have dignity in a world where you’re building technology to replace people.”

David Stephen currently does research in conceptual brain science with focus on the electrical and chemical configurators for how they mechanize the human mind with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.

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