India, June 1 -- It is not surprising that India has been lukewarm to Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence. The Pope has warned that Artificial Intelligence threatens to normalise an "anti-human vision" and has called upon people and governments to counter the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors.

Describing it as an event of "Biblical proportions," the Chicago-born Pontiff has cautioned human beings will be reduced to coins in a machine, a warning given many times in twentieth-century history by philosophers, writers and the occasional religious leader railing against crony capitalists and military industrial machines created to maximise profits, even if the result is human misery....