India, May 27 -- Pope Leo XIV has issued his starkest warning yet: artificial intelligence, left unchecked in the hands of a powerful few, risks fragmenting humanity itself

There is something arresting about the world's most influential spiritual leader reaching back four millennia to a myth about bricks and hubris to make sense of the age of algorithms. Yet Pope Leo XIV's instinct is sound. In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released on May 25, he warned humanity of a pivotal choice - "either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together." Strip away the theology, and what remains is a political and moral argument of urgent force. The Pope's central warning is that control of artific...