India, June 1 -- The first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, "Magnifica Humanitas," veers away from being just another meditation on technology; it is a civilisational warning. Placing the safeguarding of human dignity at the cynosure of the encyclical and deliberately recalling Rerum Novarum remind us how each revolution (industrial then, AI now) eventually becomes a moral question. Artificial Intelligence is not just changing the tooling with which we work; it is changing power, labour, war and the language with which human worth is measured.

The International Labour Organisation now estimates that one in four workers globally is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI, and that the highest exposure category is more severe for ...