Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical warns AI threatens humanity, but history shows technological progress lifts living standards. Why the pope and Bernie Sanders may be wrong about AI.

What Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Says About the Power of AI In, the Pope decries the concentration of technological power in a few global players. Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah shakes hands with Pope Leo XIV ahead of the presentation of the first encyclical. An algorithm decides what we see, another filters what we read, and still others enter into the processes that govern work, information, and collective choices. But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes--while updating it--the of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary.

The pope's encyclical will address'the protection of the human person in the age of AI', the Vatican says In the first major text of his papacy, Pope Leo will address the rapid rise of artificial intelligence . The Chicago-born pontiff will present the document, known as an encyclical, at the Vatican next week during an event attended by Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic - a US-based AI firm that has clashed with Donald Trump's administration. The encyclical will address "the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence", the Vatican said on Monday. In a break from tradition, Leo, who was elected pontiff in May last year, will launch the document during a public presentation on 25 May. He will be joined by lay speaker Olah of Anthropic, which is in the middle of a high-profile lawsuit with the Trump administration over the ethics of AI, as well as theologians Anna Rowlands and Léocadie Lushombo.

Florida students boo graduation speaker who called AI'next Industrial Revolution' Real estate executive got an unexpected earful when she spoke of'living in a time of profound change' Though college graduations usually consist of a speaker giving advice to students, one recent ceremony featured students giving the speaker their opinions - loudly. The University of Central Florida's 2026 graduating class booed as a real estate development executive spoke about how "the rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution" and about "living in a time of profound change". US university's commencement speaker reveals he will pay off students' final-year loans The crowd of students was so loud that Gloria Caulfield paused, turned away from the podium and threw her hands up in the air. As the crowd calmed down, Caulfield proceeded. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives."

The widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to displace people from jobs in a similar way seen during the Industrial Revolution, the governor of the Bank of England has said. Andrew Bailey said the UK needed to have the training, education, [and] skills in place so workers could shift into jobs that use AI. He told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme people looking for a job would find securing employment a lot easier if they had such skills. However, he warned that there was an issue with younger, inexperienced professionals finding it difficult to secure entry-level roles due to AI. We do have to think about, what is it doing to the pipeline of people?

For years, Paul Kingsnorth was one of the most visible members of the green movement. Then he walked away from it. Now he wants us to walk away from everything else. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return, the moment when we decided to play gods and turn our backs on the Earth. In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth was sunk in doubt. He was forty-one and had been on the green movement's front lines since the nineteen-nineties--working for Greenpeace and EarthAction, chaining himself to a bridge, getting tear-gassed outside a G-8 summit.

A terrifying societal collapse worthy of Hollywood can never be entirely ruled out. But according to one former Google executive, it may come a lot sooner than we expected. Mo Gawdat, a tech entrepreneur and author who spent 11 years at Google, has given a bleak warning about the near-future of society. Speaking with The Diary of a CEO podcast, Mr Gawdat said we'll be living in a dystopia in just two years' time. Sounding worthy of George Orwell's novel '1984', the dystopia will last up to 15 years, the expert said.

The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?

While it might sound like something out of an episode of Black Mirror, scientists have warned that AI might be coming to take your job. Microsoft researchers have revealed the 40 jobs most likely to be pushed out by artificial intelligence - and the 40 most likely to remain human. And it's bad news for anyone who has been brushing up on their language skills, since interpreters and translators are right at the top of the list. Historians, writers and authors, political scientists, and journalists are also likely to face increasing automation in the coming years. However, it isn't just jobs involving reading and writing that could be on the chopping block.

Alex Garland's 2015 film Ex Machina and Sierra Greer's Annie Bot (pictured below) follow a long tradition of female robots This year's Arthur C. Clarke award for the year's best science fiction novel was awarded last month to Sierra Greer's Annie Bot. Over the course of the novel, Annie, a sentient sex robot programmed to adore her selfish owner, gradually develops a sense of personhood – but she is hardly the first artificial woman to do so. Although the earliest fictional female robots were little more than wind-up toys, they have steadily gained substance until more recent artificial women, like Annie, have become as complex as their human counterparts. Artificial people are both ancient and ubiquitous. "Basically every culture around the world since recorded history has told stories about automatons," says Lisa Yaszek at the Georgia Institute of Technology.